On citation page (no js modal) change title to mention citation for navigation usability

[mejackreed]

The view opened, and I could see the different citations, each at a heading level 4. I noticed when I alt-tabbed away from the page (such as to write in this document), it seemed that the page would change, but it really didn't. To prevent this kind of confusion, include, as an example, "Cite" in the page title, so that the end-user will be able to stay oriented, especially if several windows/tabs are open during a search.

[mejackreed]

Seems as if it is possible to get confused to what page you are on when using modal functionality

[jrochkind]

Yeah, this would seem to be a complaint about using Bootstrap modals in general, it's a general feature of Bootstrap modals.

I suppose we could try to enhance Bootstrap modals so it dynamically changes the page title when open, then change it back when the modal closes. But I think that would get awfully complicated to get right in the general case, quickly.

I guess we could special case it just for Citations, if that one is for some reason particularly problematic, but I suspect it's going to be an issue with all of them.

We could also stop using modals entirely, but some users really like them for the functionality we're using them for. Or, I suppose we could provide some kind of user preference to never use modals -- nearly everywhere, if not everywhere, we've used a modal, degrades to a separate page in non-JS cases, so providing an option to not use modals (or eliminating them entirely) is do-able. I'm not sure we want to get into user configuration though, in general studies say users don't really want configuration, and currently we don't have any user-specific UI 'settings'.

As this is a problem with modals in general, which are somewhat prevalent on the web in general these days, and there is no clear great solution, perhaps we should get more confirmation that this is actually an accessibility problem for real users, before moving on it. Ideally with that confirmation would come more info about the nature of the problem that would help us understand the constraints on acceptable solutions.

[mejackreed]

@jrochkind after further review, I don't think the comment is in regards to in the modal view, but actually when javascript is disabled. Blacklight navigates to a new page, but the title does not change (it is the same as the show page title). Does this make sense?

[jrochkind]

Aha, if that's what's going on, that should be quite easily fixable.

[jvine]

@mejackreed, if that's happening, it should definitely be fixed, but it's not the situation that triggered the comment.

User was in the modal, trying to copy/paste the citations into a document. She clicked Cite, clicked Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, switched context to the document she was writing in, and pasted the citations there. When she returned to the page it wasn't clear that she was still in the Cite modal.

Second related issue was that Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C gets the entire content of the page behind the modal, as well as the citation content, and she wasn't aware of this until she re-read the document she'd pasted into.

Hm, I wonder if it would be possible or make sense to have modals open in new windows for screen-readers?

[cbeer]

@jvine

When she returned to the page it wasn't clear that she was still in the Cite modal.

Any recommendations for how to make that clear? Or examples of sites that do modals right?

Second related issue was that Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C gets the entire content of the page behind the modal, as well as the citation content, and she wasn't aware of this until she re-read the document she'd pasted into.

Does Blacklight need one of those javascript (/flash?) copy buttons?

I wonder if it would be possible or make sense to have modals open in new windows for screen-readers?

Do you know how you can tell?

[jvine]

Okay, I've dug into this a bit more and tested it with a screen reader myself.

• There is no way to detect the presence of a screen reader.
• It appears that the ARIA role=dialog is working as intended. When I alt-tab away from the browser (Chrome) with the Cite modal open and then return, the SR announces that the dialog is active.
• The confusing part, and I think this might be what the user actually experienced, is that when I do Ctrl-C to copy the text, at that point the SR starts reading the background page as though the page had refreshed. I don't know if there's any way to prevent this. I've looked at modals on a number of paywall sites, and get the same result.
• I don't know if BL needs a copy button, but we will be adding one in SW.

I think this ticket might be premature for action.

[jrochkind]

In theory, it might be possible to hijack control-a on the keyboard, and make it select only the modal contents rather than the whole dialog. But I'm not too confident in that working out, it's just a random idea. It sounds like this is an unsolved issue with modals and screenreaders in general, and sounds agreeable to think it's premature for action at this point in BL.

[jrochkind]

(But a copy button specifically on the citation modal seems like not a bad idea, since the whole point of that modal is pretty much copying. My understanding is you can't actually copy to clipboard in straight JS, you'd need flash for that. You could select text with just JS. Anyhow, if you're going to do it locally in SearchWorks, I'll be interested to see how it turns out, and encourage you to consider contributing it back to BL if it works out well)

[jkeck]

Not mentioning this as a concrete solution, but this is something that I have looked at to solve a different (but similar) issue: http://stackoverflow.com/a/17528590