accessibility of the reproducible builds page

Tue Nov 15 11:03:33 UTC 2016

Hi

Valerie R Young schrieb am 13.11.2016, 13:17 -0500:
>On 11/13/2016 03:30 AM, Sebastian Humenda wrote:
>> I'd like to report and discuss with you an issue that I'm having with the
>> reproducible builds page, linked from the QA page of a package of mine.
>> My package, freedict, is affected by "unstable" builds. I suppose that's because
>> the build time stamp is inserted into some of the distributed files.
>> Therefore I have tried  to take a look at the diff output, but found this view
>> to be very inaccessible on the web site. I am using a screen reader (BRLTTY or
>> gnome-orca) to read either the console or the GUI, respectively.
>>
>> I started at
>> "https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/rb-pkg/unstable/amd64/freedict.html".
>> This site is built with iframes and hence I cannot view it with w3m. 
>>
>> I changed to an X session and tried the same with Firefox. Although the site was
>> still somewhat difficult to interpret (with a screen reader), I was able to find a link called "txt" and
>> it possibly contains the build diff.
>You are right, the "txt" link is the diffoscope output in text format,
>instead of HTML format. I'll make the hover text more descriptive.
>
>I'm curious about the iframe, however -- can you explain the problem a
>little more? How does it make it hard for the screen reader? Can you not
>view what is inside the iframe? Is there anything I could do to make it
>easier for the screen reader, other than get rid of iframes entirely?
The screen reader (or the underlying rendering engine) maintains a cursor
position. Everything change at this position is reported to the user (everything
else would be distractive). When I click on a link, I usually expect a new page
to load. For frames, the screen reader does not the change, because a
not-focussed part of the page updates.

>> Therefore I'd like to request the following:
>>
>> 1.  There's an image with a useless description. It is located below the heading
>>     "Suite and Architecture". The line there looks like this (for me):
>>
>>         unreproducible 2016.10.22-1 in testing diffoscope logo
>>
>>     I find "diffoscope logo" to be not very helpful, especially because it's a
>>     link pointing to a resource.
>When you said there is an image with a useless description, do you mean
>the image labeled "unreproducible" at the beginning of the line or do
>you mean the imagine "diffoscope logo" at the end of the line? The
>purpose of the "diffoscope logo" link is to be able to navigate between
>the html diffoscope output for the same package but on a different suite
>and architecture. By navigate between, I mean it will open the html
>formatted diffoscope results in the iframe.
I meant the latter. What about "switch <xyz>" as a label then?

>> 2.  When clicking the link labelled "diff", it seems as if some kind of sub menu
>>     would pop up (correct me, if I'm wrong). That is hard to figure out, because
>>     it is not announced. I expected this link to open a new page, therefore I
>>     re-read the page and it took me a while to realize that the change was
>>     minimalistic. I suppose this is some kind of fancy Java script and I don't
>>     know the fix for this (I'm not a web developer at all), but maybe somebody
>>     on this list might know. I suppose it could be solved with an ARIA live
>>     region.
>I'm not sure what you mean by the link labeled "diff"? You are right
>that clicking the "version" link ("2016.10.22-1" on the line you
>referred to above) or clicking the "diffocscope logo" link will expand a
>sub menu (containing more details and links to information about the
>results of the tests for the architecture and suite). We don't use any
>javascript on the site, however, instead we have static html pages to
>show the results of each suite/architecture pair, so these links do take
>you to a "new page". The only differences between these pages are the
>expanded submenu for the specific suite arch and the iframe will show
>the diffoscope output or build information for the that
>suite/architecture test.
I see, this was a misunderstanding on my side. I haven't looked at the page
source code. For navigation purposes, It is much clearer, if clicking a link
brings you to a new page. Ideally, there should be a heading indicating the
beginning of the requested content. As I might have said, it's fairly easy and
quick with a screen reader to jump from line to line.

The thing now is: I'd love to give you more precise feedback, however,
accessibility for Mate just broke. So I have to wait until I can use X again.

Thanks
Sebastian
-- 
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