Over at the mighty WebAIM blog, there's an invitation to screen reader users to complete a survey about their preferences for how web sites are set up. There are several questions in the survey which I find particularly interesting from a blogging perspective:
The question "How difficult are different links with the same text repeated multiple times on the same page?" covers quite a few cases in blogging. The words comment, comments, permalink, more, and others are often used with each post, meaning up to 15 or 20 instances on the main page of a blog. For people who are familiar with the blog format, do these still cause trouble?
"How difficult are pop-up windows to you?" makes me think of Haloscan comments on blogger blogs. Do they cause problems for people using screen readers?
The question about how often users "navigate by headings" is relevant to the next section of the Guide to Making Your Blog Accessible that I'm working on - how do you break up a long post (or even sidebar) into sections that help your readers navigate?
If you're a screen reader user, take the survey when you get a chance, and spread the word.
Thanks for the plug. The response thus far has been tremendous with over 500 responses so far.
A few very preliminary data...
Responses on the question about the repeated links:
20% - Very easy
26% - Somewhat Easy
30% - Somewhat Difficult
13% - Very Difficult
Of note, repeated links that go to different destinations can be particularly difficult for those using voice recognition software where the user speaks the link text to activate it. If you say "more", which link is to be activated?
60% indicate they always navigate by headings with another 21% often using headings. I'd say that is significant.
About 1/2 indicate that pop-up windows are difficult or somewhat difficult and 1/2 say they are not very or not at all difficult.
Anyway, that's just a sampling of A LOT of data that we'll be sharing later.
Jared Smith
WebAIM