Comments on: Accessible Folksonomies http://www.alttags.org/accessibility/accessible-folksonomies/ Accessibility, Usability and Web Standards Wed, 03 Mar 2010 02:14:57 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: Douglas Clifton http://www.alttags.org/accessibility/accessible-folksonomies/comment-page-1/#comment-2005 Douglas Clifton Sat, 04 Jun 2005 02:07:13 +0000 http://www.alttags.org/archives/2005/02/27/42/#comment-2005 Funny I should stumble on your post. I just myself implemented one of these "tag clouds" this morning. I never even bothered to study how Technorati or the social bookmark sites implemented theirs, I just sort of winged it. And although I'm not using a list, I seemed to have done pretty well on the other points you make. You can check it out yourself by visiting the link associated with my name on this post. Thanks for your insights. ~d Funny I should stumble on your post. I just myself implemented one of these “tag clouds” this morning. I never even bothered to study how Technorati or the social bookmark sites implemented theirs, I just sort of winged it. And although I’m not using a list, I seemed to have done pretty well on the other points you make. You can check it out yourself by visiting the link associated with my name on this post. Thanks for your insights. ~d

]]> By: DavidSturtz.com http://www.alttags.org/accessibility/accessible-folksonomies/comment-page-1/#comment-1302 DavidSturtz.com Mon, 28 Mar 2005 19:28:49 +0000 http://www.alttags.org/archives/2005/02/27/42/#comment-1302 <strong>Folksonomy Visualization</strong> MIT Media Lab's John Maeda calls Flickr's visualization of popular tags "the greatest diagram of 2004." There are many things to admire about this format. Since it is about words,... Folksonomy Visualization

MIT Media Lab’s John Maeda calls Flickr’s visualization of popular tags “the greatest diagram of 2004.” There are many things to admire about this format. Since it is about words,…

]]> By: Kirk Biglione http://www.alttags.org/accessibility/accessible-folksonomies/comment-page-1/#comment-1277 Kirk Biglione Fri, 25 Mar 2005 03:24:47 +0000 http://www.alttags.org/archives/2005/02/27/42/#comment-1277 <strong>Sander</strong> - thanks for the feedback. I want to stress that I don’t have all of the answers, I’m just proposing one possible solution. Your point regarding the difficulties of scripting style sheets is well taken. I suspect that’s one of the reasons the current group of weighted lists are implemented the way they are. We’ll have to agree to disagree on the issue of inline styles taking on semantic meaning. <strong>Bud</strong> Thanks for posting the link to your article! I just got back from SXSW where everyone was buzzing about Tantek’s presentation on microformats. It was quit thought provoking and it got me thinking that a microformat might be a good approach to the issues I raised in my article. I have to admit, I hadn’t gotten much further than pondering the issue in very abstract terms. It looks like you’ve already done quite a bit of work on this one. I look forward to reading your article. <strong>Seth</strong> You are correct - font resizing is not an issue in Firefox. However, IE is unable to resize fonts that have been defined as an absolute unit. That’s a problem. Especially on weighted lists that use very small fonts. I tend to agree with your assessment of how the weight should be represented — either as a numeric value next to the term or as a value expressed in the title attribute of the anchor element. One of the advantages of marking the links up as list items is that most screen readers will tell the user how many items are in the list (giving the user an idea of what they’re in for once they start reading the links). Thanks for the compliment on the theme. It’s a custom theme that I created around the original design that <a href="http://www.francey.org/" rel="nofollow">Francey</a> did for us a while back. She does great work. Sander – thanks for the feedback. I want to stress that I don’t have all of the answers, I’m just proposing one possible solution. Your point regarding the difficulties of scripting style sheets is well taken. I suspect that’s one of the reasons the current group of weighted lists are implemented the way they are.

We’ll have to agree to disagree on the issue of inline styles taking on semantic meaning.

Bud Thanks for posting the link to your article! I just got back from SXSW where everyone was buzzing about Tantek’s presentation on microformats. It was quit thought provoking and it got me thinking that a microformat might be a good approach to the issues I raised in my article. I have to admit, I hadn’t gotten much further than pondering the issue in very abstract terms. It looks like you’ve already done quite a bit of work on this one. I look forward to reading your article.

Seth You are correct – font resizing is not an issue in Firefox. However, IE is unable to resize fonts that have been defined as an absolute unit. That’s a problem. Especially on weighted lists that use very small fonts. I tend to agree with your assessment of how the weight should be represented — either as a numeric value next to the term or as a value expressed in the title attribute of the anchor element.

One of the advantages of marking the links up as list items is that most screen readers will tell the user how many items are in the list (giving the user an idea of what they’re in for once they start reading the links).

Thanks for the compliment on the theme. It’s a custom theme that I created around the original design that Francey did for us a while back. She does great work.

]]> By: Seth Russell http://www.alttags.org/accessibility/accessible-folksonomies/comment-page-1/#comment-1276 Seth Russell Thu, 24 Mar 2005 23:06:29 +0000 http://www.alttags.org/archives/2005/02/27/42/#comment-1276 Great article! I checkeed all the popular folksonomy pages that you mentioned and all of them were able to resize the text in Firefox, so part of the problem might be IE. I also checked the pages with Denies's WinEyes screen reader and they were readable. I doubt that a blind person is ever going to be able to grok the weight of the terms based upon the font size. I think a better method would be to put an actual weight next to the term ... like "folkosonomy (32)" where (100) might be the most popular on the page. Imho, for a blind person a list is no better to tab through than a paragraph of links. Incidentally, what WordPress theme are you using ... it is spectaculay, i want it! Great article! I checkeed all the popular folksonomy pages that you mentioned and all of them were able to resize the text in Firefox, so part of the problem might be IE. I also checked the pages with Denies’s WinEyes screen reader and they were readable. I doubt that a blind person is ever going to be able to grok the weight of the terms based upon the font size. I think a better method would be to put an actual weight next to the term … like “folkosonomy (32)” where (100) might be the most popular on the page. Imho, for a blind person a list is no better to tab through than a paragraph of links.

Incidentally, what WordPress theme are you using … it is spectaculay, i want it!

]]> By: Bud Gibson http://www.alttags.org/accessibility/accessible-folksonomies/comment-page-1/#comment-1271 Bud Gibson Thu, 24 Mar 2005 17:09:58 +0000 http://www.alttags.org/archives/2005/02/27/42/#comment-1271 You raise a number of good points about the accessibility of folksonomy menus. Folksonomy entries themselves also suffer from this same lack of standards and use of semantic mark-up. This makes accessibility hard from the perspective of both people and machines. I've started an attempt to create an xhtml microformat for folksonomy under the title xFolk. It would really benefit from further examination. Have a look here: http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/xfolk/ You raise a number of good points about the accessibility of folksonomy menus. Folksonomy entries themselves also suffer from this same lack of standards and use of semantic mark-up. This makes accessibility hard from the perspective of both people and machines.

I’ve started an attempt to create an xhtml microformat for folksonomy under the title xFolk. It would really benefit from further examination. Have a look here:

http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/xfolk/

]]> By: blog | bookslope http://www.alttags.org/accessibility/accessible-folksonomies/comment-page-1/#comment-1270 blog | bookslope Thu, 24 Mar 2005 03:20:31 +0000 http://www.alttags.org/archives/2005/02/27/42/#comment-1270 <strong>Accessible Folksonomies</strong> alt tags ≫ Blog Archive ≫ Accessible Folksonomies http://www.alttags.org/archives/2005/02/27/42/ メモ。... Accessible Folksonomies

alt tags ≫ Blog Archive ≫ Accessible Folksonomies http://www.alttags.org/archives/2005/02/27/42/ メモ。…

]]> By: Sander http://www.alttags.org/accessibility/accessible-folksonomies/comment-page-1/#comment-1265 Sander Wed, 23 Mar 2005 13:52:59 +0000 http://www.alttags.org/archives/2005/02/27/42/#comment-1265 Regarding your inline styles argument. I would argue that this might be one of the few times inline styles make sense because of the following reasons: 1. it is easier for developers to use scripting languages in markup then in stylesheets. (no need for setting up headers and bindings on the server - it is already configured and not everyone can configurate their server) 2. using classes with names like class="rank-10" / class="rank-49" or even "size-110pct" are meaningless and clutter the stylesheet, when values change, the whole stylesheet needs to be reloaded by the browser. 3. per 1: they can use percentages as font-sizes inline, which then obtain a semantic meaning, and as part of a list can still be scaled by userstylesheets on the (un)ordered-list element (also possible by using classes). Furthermore it would be an accessibility improvement if the links or list-items would have their title attribute set to something meaningful (such as rank or percentage). Regarding your inline styles argument.
I would argue that this might be one of the few times inline styles make sense because of the following reasons:

1. it is easier for developers to use scripting languages in markup then in stylesheets. (no need for setting up headers and bindings on the server – it is already configured and not everyone can configurate their server)
2. using classes with names like class=”rank-10″ / class=”rank-49″ or even “size-110pct” are meaningless and clutter the stylesheet, when values change, the whole stylesheet needs to be reloaded by the browser.
3. per 1: they can use percentages as font-sizes inline, which then obtain a semantic meaning, and as part of a list can still be scaled by userstylesheets on the (un)ordered-list element (also possible by using classes).

Furthermore it would be an accessibility improvement if the links or list-items would have their title attribute set to something meaningful (such as rank or percentage).

]]> By: linkages - avianto's quicklinks http://www.alttags.org/accessibility/accessible-folksonomies/comment-page-1/#comment-1130 linkages - avianto's quicklinks Tue, 01 Mar 2005 16:57:07 +0000 http://www.alttags.org/archives/2005/02/27/42/#comment-1130 <strong></strong> alt tags : Accessible Folksonomies: Accessibility, Usability and Web Standards...
alt tags : Accessible Folksonomies: Accessibility, Usability and Web Standards…

]]> By: Stefan Herzog http://www.alttags.org/accessibility/accessible-folksonomies/comment-page-1/#comment-1122 Stefan Herzog Mon, 28 Feb 2005 18:52:01 +0000 http://www.alttags.org/archives/2005/02/27/42/#comment-1122 Good article. Consider additionally the potential of offering different views on the folksomony menu on the same site with different CSSs. If content and layout is properly separated (like in <a href="http://www.alttags.org/folksonomy.html" title="Accessible Folksonomy Index">your example site</a>) then different views on the menu can be realised, depending on user preferences and <a href="http://www.w3.org/WAI/" title="Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)">user disabilities</a>. Good article. Consider additionally the potential of offering different views on the folksomony menu on the same site with different CSSs. If content and layout is properly separated (like in your example site) then different views on the menu can be realised, depending on user preferences and user disabilities.

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