[CEUD-ICT] Opinions canvased on o2 website FAQ pages

[Barry McMullin]

On Wed, 28 Jan 2009, Eoin Campbell wrote:

> I also wonder if this is a good technique for people with mobility impairments
> limiting their use of a mouse, as mousing is almost essential for efficient
> reading of this type of page.

I had a go at keyboard navigation (only tried in firefox) and
found it possible, but pretty tortuous (had to enable "caret
browsing" in order to get "inside" the "overflow: scroll" styled
div that contains an expanded faq item - but there may be an
easier way I am just not aware of).  I think if I really needed
to do this in anger with keyboard only, I would disable
javascript (so everything is expanded) and use something like the
firefox "document map" extension to navigate in-page (this works
well because they have used HTML header markup correctly).  But
of course it's asking a bit much of a "lay" keyboard-only user to
figure that strategy out (and O2 certainly aren't offering any
help - can't find any reference to "accessibility" or
"disability" on the site).

As for non-visual users, I think that dynamically varying content
visibility ("display: none") is a fairly generically Bad Thing:
it is pretty well bound to undermine attempts for such users to
form a stable mental model of the page. So again, such users are
likely to do better by turning off javascript and using
header-oriented navigation fairly heavily - but who knows how
they would be inspired to try this.

Overall then, I think this falls into the "too clever by half
category" - somebody trying to show off their wonderful skills
with dynamic CSS. But just because something is technically
*possible* doesn't mean it's a good idea...

Just my 2c worth.

Best - Barry.


--
Barry McMullin, Dublin City University
   phone: +353-1-700-5432
   web: http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~mcmullin/