Exploring making site navigation more accessible, with "well-known destinations"
This page contains a video recording of the presentation made during the session from Breakouts Day 2024, along with a transcript. Video captions and transcript were automatically generated and may not properly translate the speaker's speech. Please use GitHub to suggest corrections.
Table of contents
See also:
Video
Transcript
Lionel Wolberger: Okay, well, welcome, everybody. I am Lionel Wolberger. User way. I am the facilitator of the adapt task course. Adapt is a task force where we are picking up work streams that have been in progress for many years regarding accessibility of the web.
… In the course of that work. 2 members of the test voice
… I'm going to present today a new opportunity that's come up to make the web more accessible.
… and we know it by the label of well known destinations. And so, without further ado, I would like to introduce the speakers today. Matthew Atkinson, who is the head of web standards at Samsung.
… a member of our task force and a member of the tag, the technical
… group at, and also a Co. Chair of the accessibility platform architectures working group and with him helping the presentations. Umar, who is a development architect at sap labs, India. He has been one of the leaders in forwarding the work on well known destinations. So over to you, Matthew.
Matthew Atkinson (he/him): Okay, thank you very much
… so Lionel will paste the link to the presentation slide into Irc, and it's also available.
… will be available through the the breakout day website as well.
… So Lionel's welcomed us. So I'm going to move straight on
… to what is this all about? And
… we're going to talk about the need for for the adapt work. But Lionel has briefly introduced already. We're going to talk about barriers to navigating sites. What the support might look like to make that easier. Our proposed solution in a bit more detail, and next steps.
… And one thing to point out is, I'm speaking as a APA working group. Co chair. That's the perspective of this presentation. As Lionel said, I have a couple of other roles
… in, but this work is just to be clear. It's from the APA working group. And it's very early work. So we're seeking review. And input from people, so it's it's got a long way to go before it becomes a standard. But we're very excited about it's opportunity to do so, and we we hope that that you will be the same after the presentation.
… So and then big, important point is discussion. At the end. We will. We'd like to have your questions and feedback.
… So just to give you an idea as to the need for the work that we're doing.
… We talk about users with very different needs. And many of you will be familiar with accessibility as a concept. But we're
… our our task force looks at other issues that are a bit wider than the guidelines that exist right now. That help make content more adapted to the users needs, or more personalized to their needs. And so a good example of this is, imagine, if we have a a save button in a in a web app, and this button causes the current work to be stored so it can be record later.
… Some people might like this to be a button with the word save on it other people might like now, perhaps archaic
… floppy disk icon which?
… I'm told a lot of people these days would not recognize. I haven't seen one for a little while. But that means, save to some people.
… Other people might prefer the icon and the word, for example, and then perhaps a more accurate icon. To use these days would be a a thumb drive, or even a cloud. Perhaps the the point is that different users have different needs in terms of how content gets presented to them.
… And
… there's a a great document from the cognitive accessibility task force, called making content usable for people with cognitive and learning disabilities. And this covers a whole range of really interesting and important barriers
… that you need to avoid, and importantly, how to avoid them. And a lot of this stuff is advice that is very helpful for people who are designing content.
… A. And it does require some of it does require significant changes to content, which will help make it suitable for a wider audience. But in the adapt task force we're looking at this document. And we're thinking about the things that we could potentially address in a in a robust manner, with a technological approach.
… Certainly not to belittle the importance of content editing. It's extremely important, but we're wondering if we can make it easier for people to make certain adaptations with a little bit of
… machine readable metadata. So we've got things like for web content accessibility guidelines and the document I just mentioned from the cognitive accessibility task force, and they can help you make stuff accessible.
… But we we believe an an adaptable approach needs like the one II gave an example of before with the the icons. It needs semantics. And so we're aiming for this meet a sweet spot where a small amount of machine readable metadata or semantics.
… helps us to make these adaptations
… in a robust way.
… So one area that we're exploring amongst several is about site navigation.
… And we are
… talking about the goal here that the user wants to get to a specific part of a site quickly and easily.
… So.
… there's a a concept that we have here, that there's a lot of sites share some common destinations that people often want to reach, so it could be accessibility statements. It could be the contact page. It could be the help page or the help landing page. It could be the home page, even.
… Maybe it's the login page. There's all sorts of destinations that people might want to reach that come up on several different sites.
… And so we want to
… take advantage of that and and expose those common destinations to people. But why do we need to do this? Why? Why do they struggle to find these common destinations? Well, there's many reasons.
… it could be down to the visual theme or the design of a web page or website, it could be quite difficult to read. It depends what font is being used depends what colors or or font size or layout is being used. The layout might be really visually complex.
… It might have a complex information architecture, so it might be the page that you want is is in a place that you wouldn't have expected it to be, or it might be to do with the website using different terms than you do for those pages. So, for example, some people might say login, some people might say sign in, and there might be other terminology differences as well.
… And it may be that you're browsing a website. And it's not in your native language, and that presents an additional layer of complexity for you to deal with.
… So
… those are the barriers, and those are our our goals. So what might support. For the navigation look like I'm just going to pause recording whilst I show you this demo and get this set up.
Abhinav Kumar: This meeting is being recorded.
Matthew Atkinson (he/him): Okay? So I've just shared the demo
… with the audience live. And now we're going to go back to the slides.
… So I'm going to share those.
… And
… this is just an image of what the user interface looks like inside the Web extension, which I just demonstrated to those who are attending live.
… It presents you with a number of buttons that you can use to reach. The common, well known destinations on this particular site, and the button in the browser extension is badged with the number of destinations that this particular site supports. So you can see at a glance. How many destinations are available, or, if dest well known, destinations are available on the site.
… So now I'm going to hand over to Abinav to talk a little bit about our proposed approach.
Abhinav Kumar: So thank you, Matthew, for this great demo and explanation. So Hello, everyone. Just a small, brief introduction about myself. So I'm Abinhav Kumar. I'm working as a development architect at the Cpm. Based out of Daniel, and I'm part of last
… September. So today I will be sharing with you the proposed
… approach of simplifying the site navigation, using the concept of when you are.
… So basically before I start
… to talk about what from where we call these destinations, which you will be using.
… being far exposing for the site
… so cognitive accessibility, task force. Cova has already identified a series of common destinations, and the current challenges is how to expose them, and for them easily providing the
… navigation to the end users. And we propose to do that using the
… Well-known Urls. So well known, Urls are basically the Urls which start the top well known.
… And basically these provides a consistent locations in the website where the common services and information can be. And we as the task force basically recognized the potential of using this well known URL to basically signify the site navigations.
… We, as a task force, encountered this concept, using 2 separate, independent and approaches one.
… And as a task force, we were reviewing the proposal
… from the accessibility point of view of both the well known URL for change possible. and we realize that a similar thing can be used for simplifying the site.
… Similarly, on this I mean, and my colleague from Sap, also across the task Force
… post last year to have a consistent location, and for finding the accessibility.
… So
… so our idea is basically to use the well-known Urls to expose all the common destinations patients which were provided by Cogatas
… Matthew, next slide, please.
… So we have already written, explainer
… detailing about our approach.
… So this is basically already up for review. We are also working on a draft spec. right? So that is the work in progress.
… So if you
… see what we are trying to do is basically we are coming up with a set of balloon Urls, each corresponding to
… this well-known destination for the Well known destination for one of the is East, corresponding to a well known destination. From the list.
… We also basically intend to provide one more or well known URL, basically that can be used by the user agent to provide the list of all these.
… So if you refer back the demo which was shown by met you earlier, basically, the the browser extension was relying upon this syn, this webinar URL to fetch all the
… possible well, this destinations which are provided by the others. So in the first demo we saw there were 6 or 5 or 6 bedroom destinations which were there here, and in the second demo there were 2 destinations which were provided.
… So this endpoint basically provides a simple 1 one request to query all that supported minimum destination.
… So if we see from a high level point of view, basically, we would set off
… all these well known uris to support the site navigation. We are basically creating the pointers just to the site information.
… So we intend basically to register a name space for all these proposed Urs under the well-known URL.
… So with this I hand it over back to Matthew for the for taking us to the next system.
Matthew Atkinson (he/him): Thanks very much up enough.
… So I've another described to you the process which we are proposing. Of course, this is all going to be reviewed. And we're seeking import on it. So
… we we. We're quite pleased with this approach. But we want to make sure that it's the right approach to solve this problem, and therefore, as every specification does, it will be going for a wide review to ensure that it's it's a good fit for the architecture, and that it solves the problems that it sets out to do.
… So
… we're definitely going to be doing that wide review process soon. And
… we're also as part of that working out what? The the. the, the minimum viable product, I suppose, is a good good
… phrase features. You know what is
… the the core set of requirements here for us to be solving, and to make sure that we've refined the design as best we can.
… And one example of that is, as abin, I've said, providing the single endpoint to use to request all of the supported destinations that makes the system more efficient.
… So
… we are also exploring.
… how we could highlight in the user agent
… which part of the page is the relevant part in situations where where that might be required. So sometimes a page is very big, or say, for example, the sign-in ui of a login ui is a pop up on. On an existing page. We're wondering if we can support that sort of scenario and and indicate what the relevant area of a page is when it's visited.
… So another thing that we have to do to make sure that we're solving the problem correctly. And and as part of the review process is, we need to seek what we call implementations.
… And this is where we
… certainly hopefully convince other people to start implementing the specification that we are proposing
… and implementing in this sense is talking about 2 different things. First of all, we're talking about having sites, actually expose these destinations. And then also, we're talking about user agents, browsers, assistive technologies, browser extensions actually supporting it to and exposing those to the user.
… And so we're going to move on to the discussion.
… But as I'm going to stop recording I will just show you the the last slide before we stop the recording, and to say, Thank you very much for listening, and we're very much looking forward to hearing your questions and and any feedback that you might have.
… So I'm going to stop the recording
… but then, if you, if you want us to show any of the live audience members, if you want us to show the screen shares or slides again. We can do that. But I will say to the people, who are watching the recording or listening to the recording. Thank you very much for your time, and please
… read up on the the task force. Follow the links, and if you've got any feedback you can reach us on github via the links provided. So thank you very much.