Slashdot Mirror
Listen to Webpages While Driving
dimitril writes "Tired of sitting in your car for hours and practically doing nothing but listening to the radio or the same CD for the fifth time? You could use those hours by reading your websites with this little project. You will love those traffic jams!"
just FYI. The logo on the article shouldn't be LEGO, imho.
Etc, etc, ad nauseam, and so on and so forth.
Actually, no joke. There've already been studies which show that this kind of crap is actually more dangerous than talking on a cell phone while driving (itself as dangerous as drunk driving), because a voice interface to a Web page is so awkward.
So it will take a while to get through the menus. Who wants to hear [all the stuff at the top of each Slashdot page] while trying to get the news?
This is a reminder that web accessibility isn't just for letting disabled people use your site. Many of the same techniques are useful for letting non-disabled people use your site through a device other than a computer with a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and graphical web browser.
The problem of identifying the beginning of the main content of a page is not new to this listen-while-driving application. In 1999, Jim Thatcher of IBM Special Needs Systems called it "the most serious impedement to access to commercial web content". At least one version of JAWS, a screen reader popular among blind users, provides the shortcut INS+ENTER for "move to the next block of text which has no links". That JAWS includes such an unreliable heuristic points to the importance of being able to skip blocks of navigation links.
The W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines suggest grouping navigation links in a <map> element, and until assistive technologies widely understand <map> as a navigation-link-grouping mechanism, also putting a "skip to main content" link at the top of the page and hiding it from graphical browsers.
Mark Pilgrim recommends trying to put the main content of the page first in the HTML, and describes a "table trick" that allows a navigation sidebar on the left side of a page to come after the main content in the HTML. (If a page uses CSS for layout rather than tables, it should be even easier to put a left sidebar later in the HTML.) For the listen-while-driving application, I imagine that putting the main content first is a more effective technique than the "let users of text browsers skip navigation links" techniques.
By the way, switching to Slashdot's light mode (preview) eliminates some of the junk at the top of Slashdot pages. The faq...hof navigation links are still there, but the OSDN bar, section links, and recent topic links are gone.
The shareholder is always right.