Denise (![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
denise) wrote in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_maintenance2012-02-22 01:47 am
denise) wrote in dw_maintenance2012-02-22 01:47 am
code push shortly
We'll be beginning a code push in about 15-20 minutes. Please put up your seat backs and return your tray tables to the full and upright locked position. We'll update this entry when we're done!
(2:40AM EST: As always, the prep turns out to be more involved than we predicted. We'll hopefully be starting soon.)
3:10AM EST: And, we're done! Please report any issues here or to Support.
(2:40AM EST: As always, the prep turns out to be more involved than we predicted. We'll hopefully be starting soon.)
3:10AM EST: And, we're done! Please report any issues here or to Support.
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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.
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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.
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In the suggestions posts, many people said they don't want their display name to appear. I think it's just use really inconsistently across the user base; for a long time it was exposed pretty much nowhere, so people don't have any particular standard for how it gets used.
(that being said, I think it's available to S2, so a style could be written which would expose display names beneath userpics.)
This is actually not the best way to use the description field. The idea of that field is that many people can see the image, and they have certain information available to them -- so let's use the description field to make that information available to everyone.
For example, I could have an icon of Kermit the frog making a disgruntled face. If I just said "disgruntled" in the description field, then people who can see the images would still get the extra information of knowing that it's Kermit the frog, but people who can't see the images would be missing that information. But if my description is "Kermit the frog, disgruntled face" the people who don't see the image know exactly what the icon is of, and get all of the extra connotations available to people who do see the image.
After all, there are different connotations to Kermit the frog making a disgruntled face, Bruce Springsteen making a disgruntled face, Indira Gandhi making a disgruntled face, or a stick figure of a grumpy person. We'd like to make sure that all of those connotations are available to everyone using the site.
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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.
Same person!
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!
Re: Same person!
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
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ANYWAY. All of what you're saying makes sense, and I guess I'll go and figure out some descriptions for my icons.
That last part about the comment hierarchy thing is pretty cool. I tried browsing LJ with Lynx once and couldn't figure out what comments were replying to which. It was highly frustrating. So +1 to you all for coming up with a fix for that!
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