dw_maintenance | code push shortly

The little alt. menu when you hover over icons in comments seems to be displaying the icon descriptions and comments, as well as just the keyword. I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, but it does look a bit overcrowded this way, especially since the coding (i.e. "user name = x") shows through.

Deliberate, and for accessibility (there'll be a section about it in the next news post): there was information available in the alt text (for screenreaders, etc) that was not also available to non-screenreader users via the title text (the thing that your browser shows you on hover), which is bad practice for usability. (Ideally, no information should *only* be available to sighted users, or *only* be available to screenreader users, or *only* be available to keyboard users vs mouse users, etc. There's a problem in that the hover menu and the title tip information on images aren't accessible to people who can't use the mouse or who can't use cursor hover such as mobile browser users, but that's the next problem we're brainstorming on solving.)

(You also run into a problem in that the standards say that alt and title shouldn't be the same, but we worked around that by changing the order in which username/description/keyword/comment appear, moving the information more likely to be useful to visual vs screenreader use closer to the front of the text strings so the content is the same but presented in a different order. We're also not above ignoring standards when standards work against accessibility rather than for it; accessibility for people with disabilities of all types -- not just "screen reader users", which is what many sites mean when they talk about accessible design -- is one of our key principles and it drives many of our decisions, if not most of them, in some shape or form.)

Also, by showing icon descriptions if they exist (see the title text on my icon for instance; its 'description' is the bit in parentheses) our hope is that it will make more people aware that descriptions exist, and encourage them to fill them out if they haven't already. The description is what's read to screenreader users (and shown to people using text-only browsers) for them to know what the icon consists of, since so many people use icons as an additional channel of metadata about the comment and that informational channel is lost to non-visual access. Many people have filled out the description fields of their icons (I've managed to describe all the ones on this account and about 3/4ths of the ones on my pesonal account! finally) but many more haven't, and we're hoping that by showing people (a bit of) what screenreader users experience when they use an icon, it will help them realize why it's important to add those descriptions.

People weren't using the description field to describe their icons because they never saw those descriptions and it's hard for someone who's never seen/used a screenreader to know how it presents information! (I have a friend who's blind and once I asked her if she'd mind demonstrating how she interacts with the internet. It was stunning. The screenreader reads at like 4x a 'normal' human speed and she can tell what she's hearing within fractions of a second to skip ahead if she's not interested in that section. The end result sounds like Mickey Mouse on helium with a horrible habit of cutting himself off one syllable into every word, and yet she understands it perfectly. It's kind of amazing.) So, by showing the description field, people can know what it is that screenreader users are hearing.

We wavered back and forth over whether to include the comment field, especially since in practice it's mostly used as a dumping ground for "notes about the icon geared towards display on the /icons page" instead of being information that's most useful at the time of viewing; I'm still not 100% convinced that the comment field has to be there. (We've been dithering about it for over a year and a half, actually; the discussion started up 2010-07-13 and continued on and off until earlier this month when we finally threw up our hands and said fuck it, we'll make a decision even if it's not the version that ends up sticking around.) But the description, yeah, we think exposing that is an important part of our accesibility commitment, because it will hopefully keep that information from being hidden away in alt text and keep people from not even realizing that the description field exists.

(Every browser handles alt text slightly differently, but none of the Big Ones ever use it for the hover-over tooltip; they all use the title attribute for that. It's very, very annoying, and a real mistake from an accessibility standpoint, because it means that visually-oriented users have no idea what alt text is or does or should be used for in most cases.)

Okay thanks! Descriptions showing makes perfect sense, but if you guys are still wavering on the comments part: I would honestly prefer if comments weren't shown just because it's mostly only there to display icon credit, which, as you mentioned, isn't necessarily required at time of viewing.

But anyway, thanks for the explanation.

I've got a friend who uses a screenreader, too, so being able to see the icon description is good.

The comments bit, though... nice idea, but where it's used to credit the maker of an icon, I think it'd look better if it came up as

username or

username rather than showing the HTML code - it'd be neater and tidier, because we don't see the HTML code in use, only what it does. I doubt that even a screenreader tells the user the HTML code string rather than the emphasis (if it even does emphasise whatever in the first place). That's if you end up deciding to keep the comment bit showing of course - if you decide to take that bit off, this becomes a moot point! :D

But I love the new option to show my icons in keyword order - after all, that's the order we see them in when picking an icon to add to a comment or post.

I've actually already put a suggestion in the queue for changing how we sanitize the username field. It can't show up as

username (Because alt and title are plain text by HTML standard and browser enforcement), but it could show up as "username" or "username (dreamwidth.org)". I put it in the suggestion system instead of the bug queue because it's complicated issue, how you deal with sanitizing HTML, and I wanted a discussion because I'm convinced I'm probably missing something. But yes, I agree that it would look nicer if you didn't see the raw HTML there.

Edited (dictation error) 2012-02-22 19:09 (UTC)

Is there any possibility of disabling this, or having an option to disable this? For a lot of icon uses, such as RPing journals, it works a lot better if you can have the keywords come up as alt-text without the full description.

I don't want to have to delete all the credit-giving for people who made the icons, but this change clutters up the alt text to a point where I'd almost rather not use an icon if it has comments anymore. None of the alternatives that come to mind work that well. Would it be possible to make either the description or the comment not show up, at least? Because for me (and others, I suspect) this is having the opposite effect of what was intended—I'm working to figure out ways to not fill out the fields I previously was entering things for, because it messes up my format a great deal when those display as alt-text.

(Edit) After a reread, I suppose I'm likely referencing the hover-over title attribute rather than the alt-text specifically—I use firefox, and that's what comes up. The same issue holds, though.

Edited 2012-02-22 19:01 (UTC)

Yeah, after pushing the code live and seeing examples of different ways people manage their icons, I decided that the comments field doesn't belong in there after all. I opened a bug for it and it'll change next code push.

Thanks, and I'll look forward to that. I realize it's probably all sorts of awkward and not exactly as much of a compliment as it could be, but I really am glad for the way you guys handle this stuff. Trying new things, but also being willing to go back on what doesn't work.

.../back to awkward corner.

Do screenreader users only get to hear the description, or also the keyword(s) and comments?

I usually pick a keyword that describes the general mood of the icon, and use the comments section to name the show and character(s), if applicable, and to give credit. I wouldn't want to put it all in one field, and I hope the comments section doesn't disappear altogether.

I'm one of those who haven't filled in the descriptions, because I have NO idea what to put there. Do I put the show's name? The character, or the actor's name? What would be a good description of the icon I'm using here, for instance?

I can't answer your questions but I just wanted to mention the FAQ about description if you haven't read it already as it has helpful pointers about what to put in the description, imo.

Edited 2012-02-22 23:17 (UTC)

Thank you for the link!

screenreader users get "username: description (keyword), comment".

The FAQ

ninetydegrees links to is a great resource. For the icon you are using there, think about what are the important features you want to let people know about if they can't see the icon. You might use the icon for different reasons at different times, but what's the most common for your use of it? Some suggestions might be:

"Sam from Life on Mars" (if you primarily use this just as a general fandom or character icon)
"Sam from Life on Mars looking confused" (if you use this as a confusion icon)
"Man's face reflected in a windshield" (if this is your icon for when you feel reflective, and you don't particularly care about the fandom or the character)
"Manchester, with Sam from Life on Mars" (if this is part of your icon set about great images from Manchester)

As you can see, it's context dependent, and there is no one right answer. Web Accessibility in Mind has a great resource on alt text with an easy-to-understand section called "Context Is Everything".

Thank you for your suggestions and the link to that great article. I understand it a little bit better now, but I'm still somewhat confused. If screenreader users also get the keyword and comment information, wouldn't anything repeated in the description be redundant?

F.e., I prefer the description "Sam from Life on Mars looking confused", but that can also be deduced from the keyword and comment. Wouldn't it then be better to literally describe what is in the icon and say "Man's face reflected in a windshield"?

If I do this at all I want to do it right :)

(Late comment, I know.)

Speaking for myself, I prefer repetition to a lack of description. Taking from the random icon attached to this post, the information I've given it is:

Keywords: Lion King 2 Group
Comment: Made by

eeveelutions
Description: Simba, Nala, Kiara, Kovu (Lion King 2) on Pride Rock looking out at their kingdom

There is some repetition, and on hover-over it comes out as "eien-herrison: Lion King 2 Group (Simba, Nala, Kiara, Kovu (Lion King 2) on Pride Rock looking out at their kingdom)", (taking out the comment field which will be removed next code-push) but I think/hope the description expands on the keywords instead of simply repeating them.

Just for the record, is it not true that the recurring suggestion to put a journal's display name rather than its username in the title text has been officially rejected because it would make the title text too long and cumbersome? No offense, but this makes the icon title text very long and cumbersome.

Yeah, I'm curious about this too. Because I'd really like it if display names showed up, and I definitely remember the response being that it would be too cumbersome. And making comments and descriptions show up is a lot more text than display names.

Adding description to the title text has been planned for a very long time -- we've been discussing how to handle title text vs alt text for about two years now -- so the question was never "display name or description", it's always been "display name in addition to description". (Hence rejecting the suggestion, because username + display name + description (+ comment) could conceivably be hundreds of characters long, and in most non-RP use cases, people's display name is something that has no relation to the actual journal and it doesn't make any sense to have it as part of the alt or title.)

However! Having the icon's description in the title text (in addition to the alt text) actually does cover about 99% of the reasons people want to have the display name in the title text. The reasons people have been asking for it (or at least, the reasons that have been cited when people have asked about it) is because they want to be able to easily identify who a particular character is when hovering over the icon, and that can be done by judicious composition of the icon description -- if you write the descriptions for your icons to have the character name in it, that not only gets the character name into the tooltip, it helps to tell screenreader users who the icon is of.

Meanwhile, after pushing the code live and seeing examples of different ways people manage their icons, I decided that the comments field doesn't belong in there after all. I opened a bug for it and it'll change next code push.

Thank you for responding! Buuut I still have some issues with the lack of an inclusion of the display name.

1) "in most non-RP use cases, people's display name is something that has no relation to the actual journal" I don't think that's true at all! I mean, people choose a display name for a REASON. Even if it's something silly, it's something they'd like to show up, right? In my case, my username is different than my online handle, and I know a number for people for whom that is the case. It would be very nice if we could have the names we choose show up, you know?

2) I'm an RPer, most of my friends are RPers, and I don't think I know any RPer who puts their character name into every single description field (or any) -- if they use the description field for accessibility reasons, it's usually as an identification of emotion the icon represents -- if the icons are all of the same character, which they generally are, it seems kind of unnecessary to include the name (especially when if the display name was included in the alt text, it + the description would still be helpful for accessibility). So I actually can't see the inclusion of the description field solving the character name problem at all.

Edited 2012-02-25 17:41 (UTC)

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deborah - 2012-02-25 18:05 (UTC) - Expand

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denise - 2012-02-25 19:33 (UTC) - Expand

Adding description to the title text has been planned for a very long time -- we've been discussing how to handle title text vs alt text for about two years now -- so the question was never "display name or description", it's always been "display name in addition to description". (Hence rejecting the suggestion, because username + display name + description (+ comment) could conceivably be hundreds of characters long, and in most non-RP use cases, people's display name is something that has no relation to the actual journal and it doesn't make any sense to have it as part of the alt or title.)

However! Having the icon's description in the title text (in addition to the alt text) actually does cover about 99% of the reasons people want to have the display name in the title text. The reasons people have been asking for it (or at least, the reasons that have been cited when people have asked about it) is because they want to be able to easily identify who a particular character is when hovering over the icon, and that can be done by judicious composition of the icon description -- if you write the descriptions for your icons to have the character name in it, that not only gets the character name into the tooltip, it helps to tell screenreader users who the icon is of.

Meanwhile, after pushing the code live and seeing examples of different ways people manage their icons, I decided that the comments field doesn't belong in there after all. I opened a bug for it and it'll change next code push.

if you write the descriptions for your icons to have the character name in it, that not only gets the character name into the tooltip, it helps to tell screenreader users who the icon is of.

I see! I guess the problem is a lot of RPers I know don't bother with the description field; personally, I try to put the general feeling of my icon in the keyword. So this icon, for example, has the keyword "It's up to me" to indicate that the character is determined. People can probably get used to doing it the way you're suggesting, but it's a big departure from what we're used to, is all.

Hence rejecting the suggestion, because username + display name + description (+ comment) could conceivably be hundreds of characters long, and in most non-RP use cases, people's display name is something that has no relation to the actual journal and it doesn't make any sense to have it as part of the alt or title.

The second part makes sense, but regarding the first part, both of the suggestions I saw (full disclosure, one of them being one I suggested) weren't to add the display name to the tooltip, but to replace the username, since the username is already available relatively nearby.

Thanks for the reply!

I guess the problem is a lot of RPers I know don't bother with the description field; personally, I try to put the general feeling of my icon in the keyword. So this icon, for example, has the keyword "It's up to me" to indicate that the character is determined. People can probably get used to doing it the way you're suggesting, but it's a big departure from what we're used to, is all.

See, that's a perfect example of how this change is all part of our nefarious plan. ;) The purpose of the description field is to make the site more accessible to people using screenreaders, since a lot of people use their icons as an additional channel of metadata about the comment. Take this icon *points up* -- it's my icon for use when something has gotten fucked up somewhere along the line and I am there to fix it, and sometimes I use it as sly commentary without actually referencing it in the body of the comment. The keyword is "who the fuck is todd?", which makes sense when you look at the icon itself, but is completely and totally useless for someone who isn't browsing the site visually. So, the description is used there to make the joke accessible to people who aren't browsing the site with a graphical browser (whether that's a text-only browser such as Lynx or through a screenreader, or just browsing with images off) and that way everybody's got access to the same information; it isn't limited to only sighted users.

We have a lot of screenreader users, and when we started work on DW, back when we'd first forked from LJ code, one of the first things we did was sit down and say: okay, what parts of the site aren't as accessible as we'd like them to be, and how can we fix that? The way that so much communication happens entirely via icon is a big accessibility issue, and it's one of the two things that was mentioned over and over and over again as a problem that needed to be solved. The introduction of the description field was an attempt to fix that, but it does depend on people writing descriptions for their icons, and the problem we ran into there was that if people weren't used to thinking about the need for descriptive alt text (ie, if they aren't screenreader users themselves, and don't know of anyone who is) they didn't necessarily see the need for doing it -- especially since it's actually near-impossible to access the alt text, since none of the major browsers make it easy to even get at the alt text without viewing the page source.

So, by making the title text (which is what's shown for the tooltip) be very similar to the alt text, it gives people a closer approximation to what screenreader users (and other non-graphical-browsing users) experience, and it raises awareness of why it's important to use the description field -- because for screenreader users (and other non-graphical-browsing people; 'screenreader users' is a convenient shorthand but low or no vision is not the only reason why people might be browsing without the ability to see images!) the alt text is all they have to go on.

I know it's a change from how things are handled on other sites, but we are passionately committed to making the site as accessible for people with disabilities as we possibly can, and encouraging the use of the description field is one of the ways we can do that!

To build on your example of your icon, by the way, I would write that description as "Black and white drawing of (character name) looking determined", or "(Character name), determined, in black and white pencil sketch", or something similar. Writing good descriptive text is hard at first but you can take a lot of different approaches; you can see the icons on my personal account as an example, although I haven't fully finished describing my older icons.

(For the record, the other massive accessibility problem of the "information that is only available to sighted users" variety? The way that you could only determine which comment was replying to which by the visual indentation the comment was given. A screenreader-using friend of mine had been using LJ for eight years before she figured out that was how sighted users were able to tell who was replying to whom. We implemented an outline-style numbering of comments that people can turn on for their account (it's the "comment hierarchy" setting) and now people can follow the numbering to determine which comment belongs with which.)

/is a Momiji

princeofterror - 2012-02-25 12:16 (UTC) - Expand

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pennypincher - 2012-02-25 22:20 (UTC) - Expand

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denise - 2012-02-25 22:29 (UTC) - Expand

I have the problem of one of my icons being made by a username that is less than polite language. At least before, it only showed up on the icon page.

Now, I feel uneasy about using a joke icon I have to the point where I may remake it to avoid having to credit. :\ (It's a quote from a series in icon, so it's not direct theft at least?)

Would really prefer a field for that kind of thing that doesn't show unless you go check the icon page.

Yeah, after pushing the code live and seeing examples of different ways people manage their icons, I decided that the comments field doesn't belong in there after all. I opened a bug for it and it'll change next code push.

Thanks. It's appreciated that you're so willing to listen to us regarding this kind of thing.

I didn't actually expect to receive a reply, and I'm grateful you took the time to. Just makes me happier to be here.

Just thought you might like to know that after reading the comments on this post, I went in and added descriptions to almost all of my icons. I never really thought about it before!

code push shortly

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Same person!

Re: Same person!

/is a Momiji

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Using the icon just to prove a point, not targetted at anyone.

Re: Using the icon just to prove a point, not targetted at anyone.

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