Accessible, 508 compliant Ajax Loading Indicator - javascript

How do I make an Ajax Loading Indicator Accessible / 508 compliant. My pre-compliance strategy is like so: initiate ajax request, set timeout to show an indicator(div containing a paragraph with text and a spinner in the center of the screen) if the request doesn't finish within one second, if the indicator is showing when the request is complete, remove indicator. I've tried doing things like setting focus on the indicator text to no avail. JAWS version 9 (which does not support WAI-ARIA) is the target screen reader and I am using jQuery though any solution will do.
Thanks!

If your using Jaws 9 there's no way to do this. I can think of two options. One is pop up an alert box telling the user to be pacient. Option two would be to add a read only text field and update that field with the timer value. I think jaws will notice the change if the user enters forms mode but can't test this out since I don't have a setup up for web development. I'd really suggest you push for a new version of Jaws and use WAI-ARIA as a selling point. Live reagons would make this a lot easyer.

Related

Interim message when downloading a file

On my website I have an option to display some data and also to download it in csv format. Some of the data is quite large (20,000 - 900,000 rows in SQL). When I display it on the site I use paging so that it quickly displays only x amount of rows at a time, however, the download link of course should and is downloading the entire report which can take several seconds to a couple of minutes depending on file size. I'm wondering if there is a way to create an interim pop-up or message in-line that says something like "Gathering Information..." where I could additionally put an animated gif so the user knows something is happening. Creating this shouldn't be an issue but I'm not sure if there is a way to trigger that to disappear once the download pop-up appears. The solutions I've seen on this site all suggest using a timer, but thats not an option in this case as the times will vary a lot.
I'm using classic ASP so would like to use either that or JavaScipt. I could additionally use flash if makes a difference.
I would probably wire up the "Gathering info..." message to be hidden upon receipt of a Comet style message from the server that could be sent out as soon as the file is ready to download on its end.
The gist of it is to use a cookie that you set using pure javascript or jquery cookies for ease of use. Then you send the cookie's name to your server, which sends an update for said cookie with the file once delivered.
Meanwhile you have some JS code that checks periodically for the cookie to see if its updated, and can then update the layout accordingly.
I ended up doing this a different way. On my site I have page we'll call "default.asp" on that page is a link to another asp wel'll call "download.asp". download.asp is where the code is to do the SQL query and create the report, which means this is where the wait comes in. After the report is prepared the popup to save, open, etc is displayed. What I ended up doing is creating a div that by default is hidden. When the download button is clicked the div is unhidden, then just before the popup is displayed I once again hide the div. Hopefully this can be of help to someone else as well.

replacing showModalDialog causes loss of form post functionality

I am replacing the showModalDialog function which no longer works in Chrome and FF. We have many applications using that. The problem is, pop up windows do post instructions to the web server and update the database. For instance if there's a list of accounts on screen and edit is clicked on one of the accounts, an edit page appears as a pop up, posts changes back to the web server, then the list is refreshed with changes. The entire list may be refreshed or just text that changed.
I made a javascript function to do pop up content using overlays. I thought it would be simple to replace showModalDialog calls with the javascript function, but I did not consider post instructions sent by the pop up page to update the database, and complexity to facilitate that. Posting can be done via ajax-like functionality, encapsulated in a set of functions. Before I start writing code to do this I'd like to know what other people have done in this circumstance. Thanks
I wrote some javascript to do everything I want. Since my pop up windows had javascript, I needed to run javascript upon rendering modal content, and also when the modal content went away. This will produce any number of overlays on top of each other, managing each. Content can optionally appear in a frame with a title bar, closely matching the functionality of showModalDialog.
Download at http://bikehappy.org/modal.html . If used, please give feedback saying if it works and provide update suggestions.

how to make screen readers read entire page when angular changes states?

Requirement: on each page change the screen reader must read the entire page content.
We use firefox+NVDA to do our testing, and since angular doesnt "change pages" we have tried the following to make it read the entire page when changing states:
aria-live="assertive"
This for the most part read the changes in text in our site,but it only reads what its being added, in our case we have a table being filled with ng-repeat and it reads the information being added but without any context (it doesnt say what row or column is being read)
Another issue was forms, when being filled by angular, the screen reader will read it before they were populated by angular, this was solved with a $timeout but still when aria-live reads the changes it would skip some parts, and if we added aria-atomic to force read, we had some selects with multiple options, and those were read (all of them, we have more than a hundred options). which is not how screen readers read, they only read the first ten options or the ones visible when you click on them.
Remember that without any aria-live or aria-atomic, when you change states in angular the user is not notified of any changes.
after almost giving up we decided that maybe our focus was wrong, we needed to make each state its own page so we used the following:
function ForceNVDARead() {
$(window).on('hashchange', function () {
location.reload();
});
}
This for every change in the URL will force a reload. This works GREAT, everything was being read correctly, we almost thought this solved everything. Except this causes double requests from the client to our server.
Is there any way to make NVDA read the contents of an angular state like a regular page load, without having to force the reload of the page?
Please dont say use aria-roles only or something like that that doesnt work for this and we already have them, we need the application to read everything when changing states.
ANY help is appreciated, we are about to give up, and restart the project without angular as we are not able to achieve our accessibility requirement.
Requirement: on each page change the screen reader must read the entire page content.
This is fundamentally not a requirement from an accessibility point of view, it is the equivalent of making someone looking at the screen to read everything one line at a time, or use readquick, it is not natural usage.
Screenreader accessibility is acheivable when using Angular, but we need to reset some assumptions:
When you have page updates, the key is to manage the focus, and move to the new content. That allows people to read in their own way, not the way you have been assuming they have to read.
ARIA live is intended for small updates elsewhere on the page (away from the keyboard focus), not the whole content, it is not the answer here, I would drop it completely.
If people are reading forms before they have loaded, that might be a side effect of trying to force the reading with ARIA-live. If not, then trying using focus-management to place focus at the top of the form when it has loaded.
It is probably worth reading a tutorial on NVDA usage, or talking to a 'native' user. I can say from experience you are not using it in the way end users do, so get to understand better what 'normal' interactions are like.
If you drop the use of ARIA-live and go with focus management you'll probably solve most of the issues, but there may well be more questions later from a different point of view.

How do I get dynamic (sections appear as they're being chosen) forms on "dumb" WAP phones (no Javascript)?

my site page's goal is to get information from a fairly complex (but concise) form. Ease of use is a big deal for me so when I tested the form on a WAP emulator, I was disappointed to see nothing happen when I clicked on radio buttons that successfully display the correct portion of the form on normal browsers, including the iPhone's. I've realized that this is because the code in the page is javascript and most dumb WAP phones don't support it. When I implement javascript, it's so that form options below a radio button don't show up until they are selected, and I know what you're thinking - "just make default forms options pop up" - but I couldn't figure out how to do that without ruining the whole appearing/disappearing act.
I suppose I could ask the browser if it supports javascript and redirect it to the javascript-enabled page if it does, or one without dynamic stuff if it doesn't... I wish there was a better option but how would I do that? BIG thanks in advance!
you could either use <noscript> to display the whole form on "dumb phones" or you could make some "config wizard"-like thing, like showing the radiobuttons on one page, submit it, and then (using php/ASP/whatever) send only the fields that depend on the previously checked options.

Help : printing multiple "reports" from browser (IE 6 essential, others would be nice)

No thoughts on this one? Anyone?
Here is my scenario:
I have a form where the user selects a report type, and then selects a list of users they want to generate reports for. When they submit the form, a new window is opened that uses pagination to allow the user to review each user report individual by using next and previous links.
The user wants the option to:
print both the currently displayed report by itself (that's an easy one), and
a "print all" option to print all the selected reports.
However, each report for each user must have its own "Page x of n" footer.
For the footer, I have been using the browser footer options, but in order to have the page numbering start new on each report printout, I have to make a separate window.print() call for each one. I have implemented this this way, and it works, but it's awful because each print() call causes a new print dialog to display, meaning the user has to click print in each dialog to finalise the print request. Many reports = a stupid number of popped up print dialogs.
Ideally, I would like the printing of a report group to look like a single print job, but I need that page count to be restarted for each report.
I thought of trying to count pages myself to make my own footer, but that seemed like a daunting task considering all the variables that could affect how many pages a report would occupy. I also read some about using ActiveX and WebBrowser objects to force prints and hide the print dialog, but I have had no success with that because I am running on XP SP2. Also, I understand it's frowned upon from a security perspective, and it's not a good cross-browser solution.
Has anyone dealt with printing of this type before and would have some suggestions for a way to make this work or a better way to handle it?
Thanks in advance.
I've seen this done two ways the simplist using the MeadCo scriptx component which alows you to print without a dialog. But as you rightly say this is not good from a security perspective. This was done in a corporate environment where they had control over the end users browser.
The second would be to go down the ajax route and load each report page individually, without prining, then concat each report html together into one doucment adding any needed page breaks. Finally rendering to an IFRAME and calling print on that frame to print all reports in one action.
This isn't tremendously helpful, but you may want to look into using a pdf generator, such as PDFlib or fpdf. Doing this with static pages will incur all the problems you stated, as well as some which you didn't (such as the user setting his own font or font size and ruining your pagination).

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