Please clarify on What is the difference between Display Interface vs APL in Alexa Skill?
There are a few differences mostly in terms of the interactions, usage of data to show on the screen and so on. With the Display Interface you have a set list of templates shown here, where APL shines is when offering more flexibility to show graphics that is bind to data and add interactive screens, also allows you to create slide shows, and provides more tools to customize the whole visual experience. For example you can highlight part of the text like a Karaoke song lyrics for example. In APL the interactions trigger events and state changes, for example, lets say that you a button and that makes Alexa use SSML or TTS to say something, that you can't do with a Display Interface.
Probably this can clarify a bit more.
I hope this helps.
Cheers
Related
How do you draw presentation logic, screen navigation and validation logic of controls in UML?
When a new screen is needed or existing screen is modified, I use MS Paint to get the new screen layout approved. I find myself in this situation of how best to draw presentation logic, screen navigation and validation logic of controls.
I currently use Activity Diagram and Sequence Diagram, and put the hyperlink next to the controls and put a link between these two (control and hyperlink).
Please let me know how can I improve upon and represent these pieces in a better way.
I work in windows based application.
Notwithstanding whether it belongs here or not, a couple of possibilities:
IFML, the Interaction Flow Modeling Language. Recently adopted UML notation for modelling user interface flow & content
Jesse James Garrett's visual vocabulary which covers similar ground, albeit isn't endorsed by the OMG or any other standards body afaik.
hope that helps.
What is the best approach to make an SPA (AngularJS) Accessible (for screen readers etc)?
I have little to no experience with the aria specification, and I wonder if it will at all work on a single page application.
What are the common pitfalls when developing?
How do one debug and test the accessibility when developing?
This could cover a broad swath of issues here. So I'll go through some of the basics in the hopes that it starts you on your way, the common pitfalls, as it were.
Firstly, like the commenters said, yes, you need to make sure ARIA tags are employed correctly. So, say, if you wanted to expose a div as a button, you'd have something like this.
<div id="mysuperflashybutton" ... role="button" aria-label="Super flashy" tabindex="0"></div>
This button when selected by a screen reader will be called "super flashy button", so you don't need to put button in your aria-label attribute. There are more complex examples out there, but that illustrates the basics of it, pretty much. Role, aria-label and tabindex will be the most prevalent ARIA attributes you see.
Tab-indexing elements that you want screen reader users to click on is vital to this. Set tabindex to 0 to include it in its default location on the document. If you don't want it to necessarily normally be reached by people using keyboard navigation, set it to -1. This means it's out of the normal tab order, but can still be navigated to if you want to put the user's focus there manually through javascript/jquery .focus().
As mentioned, sometimes you can assist keyboard navigators/screen reader users by moving their focus for them. An example would be if they click a button and a menu appears. You could do something like this to put them on the first link of the menu:
$('#linkmenuactivator').on("click", function () {
$('#linkmenu').find('li:first a').focus();
});
I know that's in JQuery, I'm not familiar with AngularJS but my brief view makes me think it's more of a ViewModel controller as opposed to something UI specific like JQuery, but correct me if I'm wrong.
Live regions can be used if you're doing funky things on screen that will make no sense to a screen reader user. You can write text to the elements in these regions to put the information out textually. The easiest way to do this is to use a role of alert or status, for important messages or generic status updates respectively. These roles make your element a live region by default, and any text changes in there will be reported to the screen reader. So a quick example would look something like this:
<p id="ariastatusbox" ... role="status"></p>
Then later in JQuery (taking the example of you loading a document and fading it in when you've got it):
$('#maincontent').fadeIn(function () {
$('#ariastatusbox').text('Document loaded');
});
This will let the screen reader know that the document is loaded and ready to be read on screen. Live regions can be slightly tricky, but they're a powerful beasty if you can master them.
Finally, as to accessibility testing, there's a few options. Something I recently stumbled across is Wave which appears to be an online testing tool. It looks good from a first glance, you could give it a try. Another option is to grab a screen reader yourself and give it a go. I recommend NVDA which is an open-source (so therefore free) screen reader. It's my screen reader of choice and is pretty damn good. The synthesiser it comes bundled with doesn't have the nicest voice, but there are other options, or you could turn off the speech output and view a textual display of what it would be saying using the Speech Viewer. A final option is to ask for accessibility testers to take your app for a test drive. For consumer products or things in those brackets, blind people and other users of accessible tech may well volunteer to do it if asked. For more business oriented apps that you might not want out in a public forum, there are several organisations that can consult on issues of making web applications accessible.
This is by no means a comprehensive manual on accessibility, I was hoping to really kickstart you in the right direction. For a bit of a deeper look, try looking at the ARIA roles documentation (all of it will help but the code is under the definitions heading), and on from that the ARIA States and Properties documentation. They both can be a little dry, but also have the full list of everything you can use ARIA wise. Google should be able to yield some tutorials, too, I hope.
I hope this helps get you started. Good luck!
I am making a WPF application that is to be used on a kiosk with no hardware keyboard. Currently we are using a third party on-screen keyboard, but the Windows 8 version is a lot better and we are thinking of switching to it.
So my question is simply if it is possible to show/hide it as well as show a numeric only version using c#.
Thanks!
David
From this source:
There is no direct way to control the touch keyboard programmatically.
Requiring the user to set the focus rather than the program is a
deliberate design decision to prevent UI churn.
See Input Hosting Manager and the Touch Keyboard for more information
on how and why this works. The User-driven invocation section of that
document explains the specific behavior you are asking about.
But, once the user touches an input control, the soft keyboard will automatically be displayed (with no extra coding needed).
Finally, to address your question on a numeric-only version of a keyboard, you may propose a different keyboard layout using InputScope on a TextBox. The different input scopes are enumerated here, but one of them is "Number".
I've published a sample on how to trigger the touch keyboard in WPF applications when a user clicks into a Textbox, its here:
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Enabling-Windows-8-Touch-7fb4e6de
I've been working on this sample for many months and am glad to finally contribute it to our community. Please let me know if there are any questions, suggestions, problems, etc in the sample Q&A pane
Also note that while demonstrate how to "show" the keyboard, i'm not sure how to dismiss it programmatically at this point so its important to test any actual implementation to ensure its a good experience. For example some controls like Button will dismiss the keyboard when they get focus from a TextBox, but certain ones like Checkbox will not and I demonstrate that in my sample.
I'm writing an application that is supposed to show and hide the content of the main window stack panel based on the user choice. For example, the user clicks on the button that displays the list of the customers, then click on the button that displays the ordering form. The customers content should be hidden and the ordering form should be visible. Moreover, if there are contents with related information (like customers and their data) I want to be able to change the data in one window and it should automatically refresh the data in the other window when the user decides to open it. Is there a good way to do it in MVVM?
Thanks for any suggestions.
Because this question is so generic, the answer must be as well, and the answer is that this is exactly what MVVM is for - modeling data and binding it as needed. In fact, I would argue that a majority of MVVM examples you find online will be some flavor of an answer to your question, most likely using good ol' Northwind.
It sounds like you need to really take a good look at how you want to do your design before you jump in and start coding.
You might want to check out Prism (or as it is really named Composite Application Guidance). You can build really complex and modular designs with it.
You might be interested in the MVVM sample applications of the WPF Application Framework (WAF).
Writer: Shows how the Views (UserControls) can be switched (Edit mode; Print Preview mode).
BookLibrary: Shows how data modified in one View is automatically updated in other Views.
I'm making my first WPF application, and its purpose is to generate 6 images from some data. Ideally I'd like to display them in the window, with little "forward" and "back" buttons, and a text indicator for where we are in the image-stack. Kind of like a "mini Windows Photo Gallery."
I think the way to do this might be some kind of customization of the ListView styles, but there was also the possibility of using Frame with custom WPF pages or something? I dunno, it seems like there should be a canonical way of doing this.
My current best approach is to customize ListView following the guidelines of one of my WPF books. If someone's already done this, or if there's a better way, please let me know!
You may want to look at the Slide.Show project from Vertigo. They released the source code for it as a WPF demo application. The application is a nice image viewer that you can borrow concepts from. (Microsoft mandated Vertigo to create technology demos for WPF)