{"id":706,"date":"2012-05-09T21:17:04","date_gmt":"2012-05-10T02:17:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.glendathegood.com\/blog\/?p=706"},"modified":"2012-05-09T21:17:04","modified_gmt":"2012-05-10T02:17:04","slug":"accessibility-awareness-my-1-mouseless-hour-on-the-web","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.glendathegood.com\/blog\/accessibility-awareness-my-1-mouseless-hour-on-the-web\/","title":{"rendered":"Accessibility Awareness &#8211;  My 1 Mouseless Hour on the Web"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today is the very first <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mysqltalk.com\/gaad.html\">Global Accessibility Awareness Day<\/a>.  To be a part of this virtual event, I chose to deepen my understanding of accessibility by spending an hour using the web by keyboard alone.  You see, for people with visual disabilities (that use screenreaders) they don&#8217;t have the opportunity to use a mouse.  A mouse is a tool that requires sight.  You have to see where the mouse arrow is pointing to know when to click.  <\/p>\n<p>In my work, I spend a lot of time focusing on solving accessibility issues for people with visual disabilities.  So, today, the real reason why I chose to go mouseless was to get a deeper understanding of what it is like for people with mobility limitations that prevent the use of a mouse.  Without the aid of a screenreader, what is it like to use the web by keyboard alone?  I know that one hour is a short time, but here are the insights I gained from doing this today.<\/p>\n<p>If you had been in my home office during this hour, you would have heard me exclaim:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>What Keyboard Shortcuts?<\/strong>&#8211; I need to learn a lot of keyboard shortcuts.  I never realized how much I rely on my mouse.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Get to the Point<\/strong> &#8211; Where is the &#8220;skip to main content&#8221; for me on this site.  I have to tab 55+ times to get to the main content&#8230;every time I go to a new page in this site.  Arrrrrgh!<\/li>\n<li><strong>Where am I ???? <\/strong> &#8211; Ummmm&#8230;.as I tab through this page, I have no idea what element I&#8217;m on.  There is no visual indication to tell me where the keyboard focus is.  <\/li>\n<li><strong>Missing my Mouse!<\/strong> &#8211; 20 minutes into this keyboard only hour and I miss my mouse so much it aches. <\/li>\n<li><strong>Fake Skip Links<\/strong> &#8211; Oh, cool, there is a &#8220;skip to content&#8221; link I can get to on this site.  But wait&#8230;when I click on it, it appears to scroll the page to the main content, but when I tab again, my keyboard focus is really still at the top of the page.  Grrrrrrrrrr.<\/li>\n<li><strong>My Brain is Full!<\/strong> &#8211; Oh my word!  The cognitive load&#8230;trying to remember all these new keyboard shortcuts is taxing.  Okay, so the shortcuts have always been there&#8230;but they are new to me.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Out of Control <\/strong>&#8211; I wonder if I can access a specific video that I&#8217;ve been meaning to watch.  (Navigate to site)  Oh lovely, no visual focus indicators, no skip to main content, guess I&#8217;ll begin the tab tab tab dance.  After a few unsuccessful guesses at what link I&#8217;m on, I finally hit pay dirt and get the page with the video I want to watch open.  Lucky for me, the video is set to autoplay (which I usually detest).  Why was that lucky?  Because the controls for this particular video player are not keyboard accessible.  That is right, I can&#8217;t stop the video, I can&#8217;t pause the video.  I can&#8217;t adjust volume or turn on captions. <\/li>\n<li><strong>Are We There Yet?<\/strong>  &#8211; Okay, hour is almost up.  My manta is&#8230;&#8221;I will not use my mouse.  I will not use my mouse! <\/li>\n<li> <strong>A Web Site that Works! <\/strong>&#8211;  I head to a financial site where I am a customer.  I wonder what this will be like.  I&#8217;m not very hopeful.  Surprise, this .com web team has obviously done their homework.  I login and navigate with relative ease and am able to accomplish everything I set out to do. <\/li>\n<li><strong>EasyChirp<\/strong> &#8211; One last experience to praise&#8230;I had never personally used EasyChirp until tonight.  I must say it was a dream to use in my state of mouselessness.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So what did I learn tonight in my hour sans mouse?  A gained a greater appreciation for the web accessibility barriers that remain for people with mobility issues.  No matter how much I know about how to test for accessibility issues across the different types of official disabilities (sight, hearing, mobility, cognitive, speech)&#8230;I can always increase my knowledge and empathy of inaccessible experiences.  I can honestly say that this was an hour well spent.  <\/p>\n<p>If you are reading this and you didn&#8217;t have a chance to participate in the first Global Accessibility Awareness Day, don&#8217;t fret, you can make any day your personal Accessibility Awareness Day.  I encourage you to take a moment (perhaps 15 &#8211; 30 minutes) and try one of these activities:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Go Mouseless<\/strong> &#8211; As best you can, try to use the web without your keyboard.  If you&#8217;ve never gone mouseless&#8230;don&#8217;t feel bad if you need to cheat a little.  Just remember, every time you cheat (and use your mouse)&#8230;there are people who don&#8217;t have that choice.  <\/li>\n<li><strong>Low Vision<\/strong> &#8211; Lower the brightness on your computer and\/or decrease your screen resolution to something quite small like 800 x 600.  Realize that people with low vision use software that magnifies their screens up to 36 times.  Using a screen magnifier reminds me of trying to use a web browser on a small mobile device.<\/li>\n<li>Head over to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mysqltalk.com\/participate.html\">Global Accessibility Awareness Day <\/a>Site to see other ideas for how you can experience accessibility first hand. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today is the very first Global Accessibility Awareness Day. To be a part of this virtual event, I chose to deepen my understanding of accessibility by spending an hour using the web by keyboard alone. You see, for people with visual disabilities (that use screenreaders) they don&#8217;t have the opportunity to use a mouse. A&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.glendathegood.com\/blog\/accessibility-awareness-my-1-mouseless-hour-on-the-web\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Accessibility Awareness &#8211;  My 1 Mouseless Hour on the Web<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,8,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.glendathegood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.glendathegood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.glendathegood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.glendathegood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.glendathegood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.glendathegood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":717,"href":"http:\/\/www.glendathegood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706\/revisions\/717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.glendathegood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.glendathegood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.glendathegood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}