Need a Better Surf Board? Check out Custom Labels in JAWS 6!
Like most people, sometimes my cup is half full, and sometimes it’s half empty. On a half-full day, I look at all the accessible web sites out there and consider how much things have improved over the years. On a half-empty day, I imagine my cup traveling faster than the speed of broadband through the window of the webmaster that couldn’t be bothered to make his/her site more accessible. But after the imaginary glass shatters, what am I left with? The same inaccessible web site, and the added challenge of having to drink my coffee straight out of the pot. Enter JAWS’ new Custom Labels feature, which allows you to assign your own labels to things like links (both text and graphical) and form fields.
Before I go on, I want to be clear on something: The purpose of Custom Labels is not to let web masters off the hook, but rather to make sites easier to use. If you have ever bought anything online, you’ve probably seen a form with a label like “Name (First Last)” followed by two edit boxes. You can figure out what goes where, but wouldn’t it be nice if the first edit box was called “First Name,” and the second edit box, “Last Name”? Custom Labels lets you accomplish that. Or have you ever been to a site where the link you want has a less-than-ideal name, such as “Click here to yadda, yadda, yadda”? To get to that link through the Links List dialog box, you would press C, read past “Click here to,” see that it wasn’t the link you wanted, press C again, read past “Click here to,” see that it, too, wasn’t the link you wanted, etc., etc. Now you can relabel the link “Yadda, yadda, yadda” and jump immediately to it by pressing Y. The fact that this new feature can also be used to assign labels to unlabeled graphical links and forms coded so badly that you cannot use them is something we’ll come back to in a bit. In the meantime, if you have JAWS 6 and want to give Custom Labels a try, take a look at a web site that is very accessible [The Home Page of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped](http://www.loc.gov/nls “Learn more about library services available to users with disabilities”).
On this page you will find 5 links that all start with the word “Read”:
- Read Braille Book Review
- Read Talking Book Topics
- Read annual lists of braille and audio books
- Read bibliographies of braille and audio books
- Read about our development of digital books and magazines
While all of those links are clearly labeled, I’d be a lot happier if they didn’t all begin with the same word so that I could more quickly jump to what I wanted in the Links List dialog. If you agree, relabel them using the following procedure:
1.Move to the link by arrowing to it, tabbing to it, or pressing the Move to Link button in the Links List dialog.
2.Let JAWS know that you wish to relabel the current link by pressing Control Insert Tab or by pressing Insert F2 and then choosing Custom Label.
3.Type the name you want and press Enter.
As the shampoo bottles suggest, rinse and repeat. Once your links are relabeled, JAWS will behave as if the links contain the text you provided, and will continue to do so each time you visit the page.
You can get creative with your relabeling too. For instance, on a page with a very large number of links, consider placing an asterisk at the beginning of the link name. Because links rarely begin with an asterisk, this strategy lets you jump to links via the Links List dialog much more quickly.
If you want to check out the relabeling of form fields, follow the link on the NLS home page named [Voyager Search of the Online Catalog]( http://nlscatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=First “Go to the Voyager Search Page”). It’s another example of a perfectly accessible page, but one that I could navigate more quickly with a few custom labels. There you will find the following form fields:
1.An edit box named “Step one, enter search terms”
2.A combo box named “Step two, select quick limits (optional)”
3.A list box named “Step three, choose type of search”
4.An unlabeled combo box, but you can identify its purpose from the contents (i.e. X records per page)
5.A button named “Begin Search”
6.A button named “Reset”
Why not change the labels to something like:
1. “Search for”
2. “Limits”
3. “Type”
4. “Records per page”
5. “Search”
6. “Clear form”
Note that you can relabel edit boxes and buttons with Forms Mode on or not. Currently, labeling combo boxes and list boxes should be done outside of Forms Mode because once you land on one of those objects in Forms Mode, JAWS behaves as if you were in a dialog box rather than on a web page. In these circumstances, you will not find Custom Label in the Run JAWS Manager dialog box, and pressing Control Insert Tab will launch Prompt Create. It seems that this is not the behavior Freedom Scientific intended, and rumor has it that this will be fixed in the next version.
If you want to edit a custom label you have already made, follow the procedure to create a new label. When you get into the Custom Label dialog box, you will find your existing label and can edit it or replace it. If you want to delete a single custom label, move to the item whose custom label you wish to delete. Then choose Custom Label Delete in the Run JAWS Manager dialog box. Finally, if you wish to delete all of the custom labels for a particular page, choose Custom Label Delete All in the Run JAWS Manager dialog.
Of course, once you do all that hard work, you’ll have a perfectly customized page – but just for that one computer. What if you have multiple computers: Do you have to start from scratch? No!! Just package up your settings with the JAWS Settings Packager. To launch the Settings Packager, press Insert F2 and choose it from the Run JAWS Manager dialog box. In the Current Settings list box, arrow to a URL whose settings you wish to package and press the Export button (hot key: Alt X). Repeat this for any other URLs whose settings you wish to include. If you want to verify that all of the URLs have been marked for export, Tab to the Packaged Settings list box. Finally, when you’re finished, go to the File menu and select Save As. Browse to a location where you will be able to find your saved settings, such as your Desktop or My Documents, give your settings a name, and press the Save button. The Settings Packager will create a .zip file in that location.
To install the packaged settings on the other computer, launch the Settings Packager, choose Open from the File menu, and browse to the .zip file you created. The contents of the .zip file will be added to the Packaged Settings list box. Arrow to a URL whose settings you would like to install and press the Import button (hot key: Alt I). Repeat this for any other URLs whose settings you wish to install. When you are finished, simply exit the Settings Packager dialog box and you’re good to go!
Now I want to reiterate something I said near the beginning of this entry: Custom labels are not designed to let web masters off the hook. I think web masters should feel an obligation to ensure the accessibility of their sites: It’s the right thing to do, it’s better for business, and in some cases it’s the law. Besides, significant changes to a site may necessitate a whole new set of custom labels…. That said, there are plenty of sites that could be made a lot more accessible through the use of custom labels. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
Since the advent of this new feature, a number of us have suggested the creation of a package repository so that JAWS users can benefit from each others’ custom labeling efforts. For instance, shortly after 6.0 was released, I did extensive labeling of all of the unlabeled image map links on Amazon.com. It took over an hour. As an aside, I later managed to obliterate all my hard work. It’s a long story, and if I had any half-empty cups lying around, I’d give myself an appropriate smack on the head for my carelessness. But I plan to redo that work soon – and if I spend all that time doing it, why should you have to do it as well? Likewise, if you spend a significant amount of time making some public site more usable through custom labels, I hope you’ll share. (smile)
Freedom Scientific: If you are reading this, are you planning on making such a package repository on your site? Please add a comment or let me know via email.
In the meantime, keep checking back at All About Access: I’ll let you know when I’ve redone the labels for Amazon.com – I promise to be careful this time.
—jd