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XStandard Interface Accessibility

Reply with quote We are working on making interface of the editor more accessible. The following are just a few examples of what you can expect to see in future versions of XStandard scheduled for release in late 2006. Most of these accessibility enhancements are bases on W3C’s ATAG 2 (Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines) and the ISO’s (International Organization for Standardization) guidelines on “Form Filling Dialogs” (ISO 9241, Part 17).

– Fields in XStandard’s dialog boxes have been reordered to enhance usability, saving authors time and energy. For example, the new sequence of fields gives required fields priority and groups fields by relevance. On opening the dialog box, the cursor position falls automatically on the first required field.



– Dependencies between fields are also established. For example, if the author indicates that an uploaded image is “decorative”, the “next” field will not be the Alternate Text field, since decorative images should not have alt text. The Alternate Text field will therefore be disabled and cannot be tabbed into.



– Dependencies also work retroactively. For example, if the author previously identified an image as non-decorative and supplied an alt text, when the image is changed to “decorative”, XStandard will inform the author that the previously entered alt text will now be removed as a result.



– Field lengths are designed to minimize scrolling. For example, Alternate Text and Description fields allow 2 lines with auto wrapping.

– Visual cues for required fields have been replaced by verbal cues, making it easier to distinguish between required and optional fields.



– Read-only fields are now identified visually to be distinct from editable fields.

– Wording used in labels now uses sentence case, to avoid confusing text-only applications such as screen readers.

– Allowable field values are now made explicitly clear (ex: numeric only), as are acceptable units of measure is (pixels, percentage, etc).

– Labels are aligned to the right (allowing for significant differences in label length), with values aligned to the left (allowing for sequential data entry).

– Errors are signaled as they occur, using field-by-field validation. Also, when error messages are raised, on closing of the error message, the cursor is placed at the next invalid entry, for immediate correction.



Some of these features are already available for testing in the OS X Alpha version. If you would like to test out these features, contact support [at] xstandard.com

Vlad Alexander
XStandard Development Team
http://xstandard.com


Last edited by Vlad Alexander on 18 Apr 2006 04:04 pm; edited 4 times in total
Reply with quote wow…this is looking excellent so far, vlad.

Patrick H. Lauke / splintered
Reply with quote This is an excellent job!
Reply with quote Beta 1 of XStandard for OS X is now publicly available. This version should be keyboard-accessible. Keyboard accessible means that all tasks in the editor can be done via keyboard without the use of a pointing device.

In OS X, keyboard navigation is not enabled by default. Therefore, to enable keyboard navigation, go to: “System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts”. In the field “Full keyboard access”, select “All controls”.

Because XStandard is a form control, achieving a keyboard-accessible interface depends on XStandard’s functionality and on the functionality of the host environment (in our case on OS X, that means Firefox and Safari). At this time, neither Firefox nor Safari support using the Tab key to navigate into and out of plug-ins such as XStandard. However, both are looking to support this in the near future. So when they do, users will be able to navigate between the editor and other controls on forms using TAB and SHIFT+TAB.

OS X doesn’t seem to have a keyboard shortcut for bringing up the context menu. Or at least we could not find one. So if anyone knows how to bring up the context menu via keyboard on OS X, please let us know. In the meantime, we added our own keyboard shortcut to do this: CONTROL + SPACE

To the context menu, we’ve added all the functionality of the Toolbar as shown in the screen shot below:



Before the next release, we are going to:

1. Look for ways to make keyboard navigation even easier to use.

2. We are going to make the Windows version keyboard-accessible.

3. We are going to look into making the editor screen reader accessible and compatible with products such as Window-Eyes.

Vlad Alexander
XStandard Development Team
http://xstandard.com

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