Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Accessibility/Archive 9

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ACCESS check

How is Acid dissociation constant looking now? Are the special characters in the section heading a problem? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:50, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Which special characters in the section heading? I have found "Importance of pK_a values", and that isn't a problem for screen reader users. Graham87 23:49, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Ok, thanks, I didn't know if the sub tags would cause a problem. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:51, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

There's a lot of TeX formatting used to show mathematical formulas that could probably stand to be alt tagged. I'll do that as soon as I get a spare minute. L'Aquatique[talk] 01:03, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I'll volunteer to help with that. How about the normal, non-LaTeX equations? Is the ALT text for the {{Eqm}} equilibrium templates reading correctly? I don't have my screen readers handy, since I'm still in lab. Proteins (talk) 01:10, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I think normal html formatted markup is fine. As far as the TeX alt tagging- you want do add an alt attribute so it looks like this: <math alt="alt text here">. Replace operators with words (i.e. plus, times, divided by, equals, is in equilibrium with), write [FOO] as "concentration of FOO", etc. You're a biochemist, I think you can figure it out! :P L'Aquatique[talk] 01:23, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Quick question: can I write "K_a" in the ALT text? Nice to be collaborating! Proteins (talk) 01:29, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, how is it read in real life? I think "K sub a" might be better. L'Aquatique[talk] 01:34, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

In real life, we say "kay ay" and "pee kay ay" for K_a and pK_a. I'm not sure how to format the ALT text to indicate that the letters should be read separately. On the other hand, noting the sub- and superscripts might be good, too. Ready to change if needed, Proteins (talk) 01:48, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Well, you can separate them- Ka will be read "kah" but if you write K A it should read it as kay ay". Might not be a bad idea to note the sup and subs, I'm not sure... L'Aquatique[talk] 01:56, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Should we also add ALT text to the images? I always get annoyed by that double reading of the caption. I experimented with using your alt= trick in the image tag and it seemed to work, but you can't put the text in quotation marks for some reason. You can see what I did for the lead image, and tell me if it helps. I think some ALT text could help fill in the gaps of the figure captions, especially for the titration images lower down. Proteins (talk) 02:24, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Surely ₐ (U+2090) would be preferable to _a, especially if there is ever a reason to link to this section. [[#pKₐ]] will properly link to #pKₐ, but [[#pK<sub>a</sub>]] won't link to anything. Unicode letters would be a better option than subscript hacks in the long run anyway… after all you might want to write an article titled pKₐ. — CharlotteWebb 13:30, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I don't think so. We've had a lot of problems with unicode in the past- not just for screen readers but also for people using outdated browsers and such. It's better to not use unicode at all. If linking to that section is going to be a problem, let's just rename it. L'Aquatique[talk] 21:25, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Done, replaced "pK_a" with "acid dissociation constant". L'Aquatique[talk] 21:31, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I trimmed those section headings slightly, to avoid repeating the article title per MOS:HEAD: "Section names should not explicitly refer to the subject of the article, or to higher-level headings, unless doing so is shorter or clearer." i tried to find good rewordings; does everyone like them? Do people agree with the ALT text that L'Aquatique and I added to the equations and to the first image of the lead? Proteins (talk) 01:41, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

ReCatchpas

Hi folks-
I do some work for the Account Creation team, and we've had three complaints in as many days from disgruntled screen reader users who could not create accounts because of the catchpa. Our mailing list exists for exactly that purpose, but we've been trying to automate the process as much as possible (due to the sheer amount of requests we recieve) and unfortunately that has resulted in it being increasingly difficult to actually contact the mailing list. So, after all these complains we've been discussing the feasibility of bugging the devs to turn on recatchpas- basically audio versions of normal catchpas. I have no experience with them, but at least one person has said that they aren't very user friendly and might not even help at all. Do you guys have any ideas how we might fix this situation? I've invited the folks from the mailing list to come here too so we can all discuss this. L'Aquatique[talk] 01:46, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Also see User:Fastfinge#Captcha Status and my comments on Fastfinge's talk page for more info on this problem. I've never used recaptcha so I don't know how good/user-friendly it is. Graham87 01:59, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Going off of the idea of using audio files, we could just have a set of say, 500 prerecorded, clearly spoken audio files containing 1 word each. A new user could just type out whatever is said, and the problem would be solved. I don't know how feasible this option is though. - NuclearWarfare ^{contact me}_{My work} 03:40, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

This is now a thread at the technical village pump, see here: Wikipedia:VP/T#Captchas_and_the_blind. L'Aquatique[talk] 06:09, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

You might have trouble coming up with 500 words which do not have regional variations of pronunciation and/or spelling, and which do not sound identical or very similar to some other word or phrase, even when spoken "correctly". If you come up with a list, I'd like to see it. — CharlotteWebb 16:46, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

It doesn't have to be perfect. I often have problems with the visual ones, trying more than one image before it works, and I have good eyesight. As long as a user could get it right in two or tree attempts I think it would be acceptable. And if that didn't work there would still be the option to contact an admin. I can't see any harm in adding it.
—Apis (talk) 02:54, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Image:TelfordMap.jpg

Image:TelfordMap.jpg relies on colour to convey information. Are there others like this? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:29, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Indeed it does, but somehow I think that's the least of its problems right now. Pretty messy- and virtually impossible to tell what it is without cheating and peeking at the caption.

The thing about color coded maps is, lots of them exist, for example Image:New-Map-Francophone_World.PNG, Image:DeutschsprachigeWelt.png. It's important that we make sure they have appropriate contrast and don't use red and green as a color scheme. Other than that the best fix for supplementing color seems to be having lists attatched, for example in the first map alongside the key it might be helpful to have something that says "Main Language: Québec (Canada), France, Belgium, Switzerland" etc etc. Obviously this is time consuming but it seems like the simplest fix. L'Aquatique[talk] 18:23, 21 November 2008 (UTC)