Hi Jed,
It would be helpful to know what web browser and operating system you are using so I could recreate your computing environment. Since I don't have this information, I went ahead and did some testing on Windows 7 64-bit with both Internet Explorer 10 and Firefox 24 to figure out the best way to sign out from Google. The first detail to point out is that by default the Sign Out link is not displayed visually on the page when you are logged in, and because of this the Sign Out link is also not accessible to screen readers without taking additional action. Before the Sign Out link can be activated, you first have to display it on the page by activating the Account widget link. The name of this link will depend on what your Google account name or username is but it should be the 7th link on the page that comes right after the Share link. There are two strategies for accomplishing the task of activating the Sign Out link with Window-Eyes. The first is to turn on browse mode, locate the Account widget link and activate it. After doing so, a modal popup dialog will be displayed that contains additional links including the Sign Out link. At this point, I would recommend redrawing the screen with Insert-Backslash to make sure Window-Eyes sees the new information. Once you have redrawn the screen, navigate down the page (or in this case, down through the Account widget popup dialog) until you find the Sign Out link and activate it. The other option is to turn off browse mode first, locate the Account widget link, activate it and since browse mode is off you shouldn't have to redraw the screen to find the Sign Out link in the popup Account widget dialog. These techniques should work on any of Google's pages including the search page, Gmail, Google Drive, etc. Behind the scenes, the Sign Out link is listed in the page's HTML source code (this is referred to as the Document Object Model or DOM). But, the reason why the Sign Out link is not displayed visually or accessible with a screen reader by default is because the Google web designer is using a special ARIA attribute called "has popup" for the Account widget containing the Sign Out link and initially sets the attribute's value to false. This causes the web browser to hide the Account widget popup dialog and all of the Account widgets children or items it contains until you activate the Account widget link. Activating the Account widget link toggles the "has popup" ARIA attribute value to true and triggers the popup Account widget dialog to be displayed visually and making the information accessible to a screen reader. You might be asking yourself, why does Google hide the Sign Out link and make this process so difficult for me, I just want to Sign Out? Well, this is just a design decision they made and is based on Google's philosophy of making their web pages behave more like a dynamic application than a static webpage. Google uses Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA) markup extensively in their web pages to add application like functionality and to enhance the accessibility of their pages for access technology users. Once you get a feel for using Google's webpages and ARIA elements, they can become more intuitive and efficient to use. This might require additional training but ARIA is the future of the web and accessible web design so it is probably time for everyone to get on board so you don't get left behind. Regards, Marc Subject: major google help needed From: "Jed Barton" <[email protected]> Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 21:00:20 -0400 Reply-To: <[email protected]> Hey guys, I've had this problem for 3 days, I was helping my mom the other day with her gmail account, and I can't get out of it. For some reason, my browser is retaining all kinds of crap, and some very odd stuff is coming up. All I wanna do is sign out of it, and it's saying stuff liks wissawick and empty iframe. All kinds of what appears to be junk, there isn't even a god damn sign out button. This is ridiculous! Sorry guys, I'm just frustrated. All I wanna do is sign out of hers, and get back to mine. Hers doesn't even have basic html. And when I try and navigate with the mouse all it does is ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. You can manage your list subscription at http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv.
