Category Archives: Skip Navigation

Skip Navigation for web pages

Simple Accessibility Updates to Improve New York Times New Redesign – Part 2

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For those following along, this is Part 2 of my series on how the New York Times can make simple updates to improve their website’s accessibility. “Part 1 – Simple Accessibility Updates to Improve New York Times New Redesign” is available for those who missed reading it.

Reminder: I’ve written these posts to help to the New York Times, along with anyone with large websites, or those who are designers or developers, etc., to show that simple incremental changes can improve their website in the long run.

In this post, I will cover the following accessibility issues with the New York Times home page:

  • Missing skip navigation
  • Difficultly seeing visual cues for those only using the keyboard
  • Poor color contrast
  • Not able to use video player by keyboard only
  • No captioned videos for individuals that are deaf or hard-of-hearing

Adding Skip Navigation

Skip navigation allows people that use a keyboard or assistive technologies like screens reader JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, etc.) to bypass large sets of links and focus on the content. Unfortunately, the New York Times pages are missing skip navigation, which means that screen reader users must listen to all of the preceding content before getting to the main articles.

Adding skip navigation to your pages is fairly easy as shown in this article on my blog called “Are You Using Skip Navigation?”.

You can choose between a few different techniques to hide your skip navigation depending on what your design team or marketing department want. Here are a few articles about skip navigation:

Note: These websites have additional accessibility articles you might want to read when you have the time.

An example of skip navigation can be found on my main website (press TAB to see the “Skip to Main Content” link at the top of the page). I haven’t yet updated my blog’s WordPress theme to include skip navigation.

Visible 'Skip to Main Content' link on jfciii.com website

Thinking About Color Deficiency (Colorblindness)

Approximately 8% of the population (mostly male) has one of the three main types of colorblindness (deuteranopia, protanopia, and tritanopia). This, along with small text, might make it difficult to read parts of the New York Times homepage.

The following examples demonstrate what people with normal vision see as compared to the three main types of colorblindness:

The opinion page section with now colorblindness mask added

Normal vision

Deuteranope colorblindness mask added to the opinion page section

Deuteranope (a form of red/green color deficit)

Protanope colorblindness mask added to the opinion page section

Protanope (another form of red/green color deficit)

Tritanope colorblindness mask added to the opinion page section

Tritanope (a blue/yellow deficit- very rare)

To help people who are colorblind, the New York Times needs to verify the color contrast ratios.

Analyzing Color Contrast

For those who have low vision, poor eyesight, or colorblindness, some of the text on the New York Times home page could be difficult to read. An example would be the bylines to their articles.

New York Times feature article bylines

Bylines from New York Times feature articles on home page

If you were to use one of the many check color contrast tools, such as Jonathan Snook’s “Colour Contrast Checker” you input the foreground (font/text) color and the background color to see if it passes WCAG 2.0 standards:

  • Level AA: contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text
  • Level AAA: contrast ratio of 7:1 for normal text and 4.5:1 for large text

You can be get the hexadecimal numbers from Photoshop (designers), or by right clicking the text and having the Firefox plug-in FireBug (developers). In this case the CSS is:

.NYT5Style .byline { color: #808080; font-size: 10px; line-height: 12px; margin: 4px 0 2px; }

The screenshot shows the Colour Contrast Checker after I added the CSS from one of the home page bylines. As you can see, the foreground color #808080 is a light gray, which has inadequate color contrast on a white background with a ratio of 3.95.

New York Times poor byline color contrast show on Jonathan Snooks colour contrast tool
Another reason it might be difficult for others to read the byline is because the font size is only ten pixels (10px). I recommend that the font size be no smaller than 12 to 14 pixels (12px to 14px) depending on font choice. The font Arial at 12 pixels (12px) is smaller than Helvetica at 12 pixels (12px).

Some of the more popular color contrast checkers/resources are:

Providing Visual Cues for Keyboard-only Users

It is difficult to see where you are (that is, which links are active) when tabbing through the home page. One way the New York Times can fix this is by adding “:active” (IE browsers) and “:focus” (for all other browsers) in the CSS to the elements that include “:hover.” Then, when you tab, the links are indicated (in this example, with an underline).

Here are the current and updated examples of the CSS:

Current CSS

a:hover { text-decoration: underline }

Updated CSS

a:hover, a:focus, a:active { text-decoration: underline }

Making the Video Player Keyboard Accessible

Keyboard-only users cannot play, pause, enlarge the video to fill the entire screen, or change the volume.

A friend who works in the accessibility field asked if I knew of any way to make a YouTube player keyboard accessible for a .gov website he and his team were working on. I told him how Derek Featherstone and his team had used YouTube’s API to create their own links to play, pause, etc. the video by using JavaScript and CSS to place the links over the inaccessible ones. Due to time constraints, my friend and his teammates added an additional set of controls below the video, which did the trick of making the video player accessible.

Captioning Videos

I looked at several videos on the home page, and none of them had captioning. Lack of captions can make following, along with the video difficult for those that are deaf or hard-of-hearing .

Solve this problem by getting the videos captioned. Many services are available that will caption your videos for a price. The quality of the captioning somewhat depends on how much money you have to spend.

No captions for this video and no ability to turn them on if they were available

No captions available

Another solution is to take a transcript, if available and use captioning software that will split the text/captions at the correct places.

Conclusion

So this concludes Part 2 of my series on “Simple Accessibility Updates to Improve the New York Times New Redesign”. The next blog post will be about the accessibility issues found on the article pages, which I’m guessing will have similar issues as the home page does, and finally how to use all the tools I used.

I hope this post helps you find easy ways to check your websites quickly for accessibility issues, along with pointing out a few free tools you can use.

If you have other tools or software that you use to check website accessibility, please add them in the comments, because not all tools will find all the issues.

References

Screen Readers

Skip Navigation Articles

You can find more great accessibility articles on both of these websites.

Color Contrast Tools

Edited by: Char James-Tanny of JTF Associates, Inc. – @CharJTF

How to Improve Your Search Usability

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Doing searches on websites is a pain when you are using assistive technology. There are ways to improve how you get to the results.

Why not add an HREF anchor like #maincontent, which we used for the “Skip Navigation” article to your “Search Results URL” so those using screen readers, other assistive technologies, keyboards only, or other non desktop web browsers to skip right to the results section of the page skipping all the header, primary navigation links, and secondary navigation, etc.

You also need to make sure you have a LABEL connected to your search box for screen reader and other assistive technology users to know what they are looking at. Below is some sample code you can use as a starting point, along with some CSS to hide the search LABEL visually off screen if your design calls for that kind of things.

Search Form Code

<div class=”SEARCH“>
<form name=”Skills_Search” action=”searchResults.html#MAINCONTENT“>
<label for=”search2“>Search</label>
<input type=”text” name=”search2″ id=”search2” />
<input type=”submit” value=”Search” />
</form>
</div>

Results of Search Code



To hide the word “Search“ just add to the hide class used for the skip navigation blog post this can be done easily by adding “.search label” to the CSS.

Here’s a live example of the search box and search results example page.

Hope this little change to your website was helpful to you and it will make accessing the internet for those using assistive technologies better.

If you have any questions or ways to improve this, please leave a comment or get in touch with me.

How to Hide “Required” from Visual Users, but Make it Available for All Others

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How do most people usually designate that a field is “Required” in a web FORM? I would think that it is with an asterisk (*) after the actual INPUT field and it is sometimes made “bold” and “RED”. There are other ways to do this that are simple, use web standards, good design principles, and are 508 compliant.

When creating a FORM you should not make all fields required. By doing that nothing stands out to the person filling in your very important FORM. If most fields are required you should state at the top of the FORM or in the directions the fields that are NOT required.

Instead of just placing an asterisks after either the LABEL or the INPUT field in a FORM for a required field as most people do. You can actually place the word “Required” within the LABEL. Of course your using LABELs for your FORMS, along with FIELDSETs and LEGENDs.

Here is how to accomplish this for a web FORM and it can be easily accomplished by using a little CSS to hide the text that a field is “Required” to be filled in. The way to do this, that I use is to make it part your input fields LABEL. Here is an example of a few lines of code on how the code might look.

<label for=“username”><em>Required<em>User Name</label>

To hide the word“Required” you will be able to use the same CSS used for hiding “SKIP NAVIGATION” by adding a new class or stating that LABELs with an “EM“ in them will be displayed.hidden off the page.

Reminder please do not use “DISPLAY: NONE” in your CSS, since screen readers will not see it. Below is the CSS to visually hide the word “Required” from browsers.

.skip a, .skip a:hover, .skip a:visited, label em {
position: absolute;
left: -10000px;
top: auto;
width: 1px;
height: 1px;
overflow: hidden;
}

As you can see the CSS positions the link absolutely with a position of “LEFT” minus 10,000 pixels and a “TOP” position of auto. This will allow screen readers, Blackberries, Treos, etc. to see it but not browsers. That is as long as their CSS in turned on.

You can also place extra notes or instructions for a field inside the INPUT field with lighter text that is that will not go away once you start typing in the field. This can be done by using more CSS. Below is the XHTML code to accomplish this.

<label for=“username”><em>Required<em>User Name<strong>must not contain spaces<strong></label>

<input type=“text” name=“username” id=“username” size=“25” maxlength=“50” value=“”/>

The CSS to do this is fairly simple and follows below.

label strong {
color: #aaa;
font-size: .85em;
font-style: normal;
position: absolute;
top: 0;
right: -275px;}

Here is what the CSS is doing for the extra notes and instructions. It is first taking any STRONG elements within the LABEL and making it light gray color, the FONT-SIZE smaller and normal weight. After that it is absolutely positioned at the top left of the INPUT FORM field, as long as the LABEL is left or right justified to it and finally placing the information negative 275 pixels from the right of the beginning of the INPUT field.

Don’t forget to listen to your FORMs by using the Firefox extension Fire Vox. Here is an example how placing extra notes or instructions would look in a FORM, along with some “Required” field examples.

I hope this post is useful and further explains how to hide visual the word “Required” from my Accessibility presentation “Is your Website Accessible?”, please look for the most current presentation closer to the top of the list.

Are You Using Skip Navigation?

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Skip navigation is a great thing to have on your website for a lot of reasons. Here is a list of just a few of them the greatest ones being the first two, that they make websites more accessible to all.

  • People using screen readers are forced to listen to a long lists of navigation links, sub-lists of links, and other elements before arriving at the main content.
  • Keyboard users are forced to tab through all of the top links in order to reach the main content.
  • Main content is not usually the first thing on the page or in the source order.
  • People using Blackberries, Treos, etc. have to scroll through a huge list of links.

Now that I have listed some of the reasons for skip navigation here is the code that I use in my websites.

<body>
<div class=”hide”> <a href=”#MAINcontent”>Skip to Main Content</a> </div>

“navigation and other stuff goes here”

<a name=”maincontent”></a>
<p>This is the first paragraph</p>

Please notice that the HREF anchor has “MAINcontent” in the link part, by using “MAIN” in front of it you can still use “content” as an anchor somewhere else on the page for some odd reason. The other point to notice is that link text is “Skip to Main Content” because some screen readers or their voices might mis-pronounce the link text if it was “Skip to Content“. The screen readers have issues with the word content.

Below is the CSS that I use in my websites to not display the skip navigation link(s) accept for the first time you tab through it then after you use it it does not show up on the screen anymore. I changed the ID information from the ones used in the original article by WebAIM on how to implement skip navigation (thanks, Justin Thorp). The article uses the ID of “skip“, I figure you might want to use it hide other items or you might want to have more than one “skip” type link, so I changed it to be a “CLASS” instead of an “ID“. The reason I changed the “ID” to .HIDE from the article was so you could use the CLASSs for other things like visually hiding the word “Required” for web FORM LABELs.

Reminder please do not use “DISPLAY: NONE” in your CSS, since screen readers will not see it.

CSS below was updated on January 29, 2014.

.hide a, .hide a:hover, .hide a:visited {
display: block;
position: absolute;
left: -10000px;
top: auto;
width: 100%;
height: 3em;
font-weight: bold;
text-align: center;
}

.hide a:active, .hide a:focus {
background: #fff; /* change to whatever your color scheme is */
color: #3d3d3d; /* dark gray */
position: static;
width: auto;
height: auto;
padding: 1em;
margin: auto;
}

As you can see the CSS positions the link absolutely with a position of “LEFT” zero pixels and a “TOP” negative 500 pixels. This will allow screen readers, Blackberries, Treos, etc. to see it but not browsers.

I hope this post is useful and further explains skip navigation from my Accessibility presentation “Is your Website Accessible?” at Refresh DC.

Further Explanation of My Accessibility Presentation

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Over the next few weeks YEARS, I will post in more detail different sections of my “Is Your Website Accessible” presentation.

Two of the topics I have already covered on my blog are:

  1. Use of UL or OL in HTML Forms
  2. CLiCk Speak Firefox Extension

The new ones I will be going over to an excessive degree (just kidding) are:

  1. The “Fire Vox” Firefox extension is a FREE screen reader
  2. Part of CSS3 “Say-Instead
  3. Are You Using Skip Navigation?
  4. How to Use Access Keys
  5. How to Hide “Required” from Visual Users, but Make it Available for All Others
  6. You Need Color and Contrast
  7. How to Create Web Standard Accessible Tables
  8. How to Improve Your Search Function
  9. Advanced Forms Information
  10. Improve Your “Return to TOP” of Page Link

Please leave a comment if you would like me to explain other items covered in my talk at greater length or even something I did not cover that deals with accessibility.