Dear list members, I want to point you to a solvable usability problem for blind readers on Mediawiki pages such as articles at the English language Wikipedia.
For screen reader users it takes quite long to walk throught the headlines. At every single headline we hear "left bracket edit right bracket link" first instead of the real section title. This problem is called Bug 11555 and could easily be solved by let the edit-section-link come second in the rendered page and let the section title come first. This means to move the section edit links right next to the headings as they are in the German or French language Wikipedia. It makes it much easier to navigate by headings for screen reader users, as the link "[Edit]" is spoken after the section name instead of before it. Some sighted users must like it as well because it has been added to a few other Wikimedia projects. If you have an account on the English language Wikipedia, you can use a piece of java script for solving this navigation problem. Unfortunately, this is not possible for blind Wikipedia readers without a Wikipedia account. This is the reason why bug 11555 should be fixed soon. Please read more at: http://blind.wikia.com/wiki/Accessibility_and_Wikis#Section_title_and_edit_link The free and independent online encyclopedia Wikipedia is an important resource in information society and thereby also important for e-learning and e-participation. Wikipedia provides masses of text based knowledge and has one of the largest online communities worldwide. The user interfaces, contents and the great help pages are multi-lingual available and fortunately this collaborative platform is almost accessible for screen reader users. Although most visitors are only searching for information, every web user can easily contribute and participate in the constructive network. Because all work can be done at home, Wikipedia offers persons with mobility or social problems an opportunity to do something productive and sustainable for society. Wikipedia is run by the free and open source MediaWiki software which is developed by employees of the Wikimedia Foundation and by a worldwide community of volunteers. The Foundation relies on public contributions and grants to fund its mission of providing free knowledge to every person in the world. Learn more at the following Wikipedia articles: About Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia About the Mediawiki software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediawiki About the Wikimedia Foundation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation As disseminators you could help by informing blind web users about bug 11555. It would be very helpful if other screen reader users would report about this Bug in their blogs respectively in mailing lists or write to the Wikimedia Foundation and to the mailing list of the Mediawiki developers. As it seems, the foundation and the developers don't believe Wikipedia has more than a few blind readers around the world and that is not true. Accessibility and usability for screen reader users are difficult to communicate and we have to convince politely: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Best regards, Per Busch P.S.: If you want to know who I am, you perhaps would like to have a look at my public list of e-dreams: http://www.epractice.eu/blog/265 Join Access India convention: For updates on it visit: http://accessindia.org.in/harish/convention.htm Registration is now open! To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
