Accessibility audit uncovered issues screen-reader users would
have with autofocus on Notify pages. Autofocus can lead to
confusion for those types of users and make them miss parts
of the page.
Hence, we decided that autofocus will be turned off by default
for live-search component.
We decided to keep the autofocus on for live-search text box when:
1. the page is a task page - as opposed to browsing pages, where
user wonders freely, task pages have more established flow, so
page focusing on textbox can actually be helpful.
2. page does not have actionable elements above the autofocus.
Accessibility audit uncovered issues screen-reader users would
have with autofocus on Notify pages. Autofocus can lead to
confusion for those types of users and make them miss parts
of the page.
Hence, we decided that autofocus will be turned off by default
for live-search component.
We decided to keep the autofocus on for live-search text box when:
1. the page is a task page - as opposed to browsing pages, where
user wonders freely, task pages have more established flow, so
page focusing on textbox can actually be helpful.
2. page does not have actionable elements above the autofocus.
Accessibility audit uncovered issues screen-reader users would
have with autofocus on Notify pages. Autofocus can lead to
confusion for those types of users and make them miss parts
of the page.
Hence, we decided that autofocus will be turned off by default
for live-search component.
We decided to keep the autofocus on for live-search text box when:
1. the page is a task page - as opposed to browsing pages, where
user wonders freely, task pages have more established flow, so
page focusing on textbox can actually be helpful.
2. page does not have actionable elements above the autofocus.
Accessibility audit uncovered issues screen-reader users would
have with autofocus on Notify pages. Autofocus can lead to
confusion for those types of users and make them miss parts
of the page.
Hence, we decided that autofocus will be turned off by default
for live-search component.
We decided to keep the autofocus on for live-search text box when:
1. the page is a task page - as opposed to browsing pages, where
user wonders freely, task pages have more established flow, so
page focusing on textbox can actually be helpful.
2. page does not have actionable elements above the autofocus.
Accessibility audit uncovered issues screen-reader users would
have with autofocus on Notify pages. Autofocus can lead to
confusion for those types of users and make them miss parts
of the page.
Hence, we decided that autofocus will be turned off by default
for live-search component.
We decided to keep the autofocus on for live-search text box when:
1. the page is a task page - as opposed to browsing pages, where
user wonders freely, task pages have more established flow, so
page focusing on textbox can actually be helpful.
2. page does not have actionable elements above the autofocus.
This change has been made because autofocus has been confusing
to users of screenreaders because they orient themselves by
what is in focus. Moving it when the page loads without warning
can cause confusion and mean they miss parts of the page
before the point focus has moved to.
So now we will only turn on autofocus if there are no other
elements in the page that need attention than the search box.
It was missing the base class so didn’t get all the styling (like the
spacing and uppercase text).
Already fixed this for step 6, but less haste, more speed.
We want it to be very clear whether you’re in live or training mode
because:
- you may be switching back and forth between them
- doing something in live mode when you think you’re in training mode
would have… consequences
By adding a label next to the service name you’ll will have some
indication, on every page, which mode you are in.
Style of the label is based on the ‘Tag’ component from the Design
System:
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/tag/#showing-multiple-statuses
If you’re adding another area to your broadcast it’s likely to be close
to one of the areas you’ve already added.
But we make you start by choosing a library, then you have to find the
local authority again from the long list. This is clunky, and it
interrupts the task the user is trying to complete.
We thought about redirecting you somewhere deep into the hierarchy,
perhaps by sending you to either:
- the parent of the last area you’d chosen
- the common ancestor of all the areas you’d chosen
This approach would however mean you’d need a way to navigate back up
the hierarchy if we’d dropped you in the wrong place. And we don’t have
a pattern for that at the moment.
So instead this commit adds some ‘shortcuts’ to the chose library page,
giving you a choice of all the parents of the areas you’ve currently
selected. In most cases this will be one (unitary authority) or two
(county and district) choices, but it will scale to adding areas from
multiple different authorities.
It does mean an extra click compared to the redirect approach, but this
is still fewer, easier clicks compared to now.
This meant a couple of under-the-hood changes:
- making `BroadcastArea`s hashable so it’s possible to do
`set([BroadcastArea(…), BroadcastArea(…), BroadcastArea(…)])`
- making `BroadcastArea`s aware of which library they live in, so we can
link to the correct _Choose area_ page
previously the back link went to choosing a library.
Now, if you view a district from a county, go back to the county page.
Otherwise, go back to the top level of the library.
I’ve swapped the order of the first paragraph so it joins into one
sentence, and leads with ‘Notify has not broadcast your alert’ which
is the response to what the user has just done. I don’t think we need
to say ‘still’ because the idea is users will swap back and forth
between training and real depending on the situation.
For a training broadcast the user doesn’t get that immediate feedback
that something has happened, like they would with a real alert, or even
sending themselves a text message.
This commit adds another tour-style page which will interrupt their
journey and hopefully reinforce the message we’ve given them earlier in
the tour.
We’re adding this because we’ve found in research that users don’t have
a good grasp of the consequences and severity of emergency alerts,
versus regular text messages.
If there is a search term when the page loads, a
statement about the results is added to the
searchbox label.
All subsequent searches are announced via an aria
live-region.
We need to give people a better feel for the consequences of
broadcasting an alert. We’ve seen in research that some users will
assume it is subscription based, or opt-in, rather than going to every
phone in the area.
I reckon that the most effective way to communicate this is to put some
numbers next to the areas, to give people an idea of how many people
will get alerted.
We can estimate how many phones are in an area by:
- taking the population of all electoral wards in that area
- multiplying it by the percentage of people who own an internet
connected phone[1]
The Office for National Statistics publish both these datasets.
The number of people who own an intenet connected phone varies a lot by
age. Since the population data for each ward is broken down by age we
can factor this in. Simplified, the calculation looks like this:
- take the _Abbey_ ward of _Barking and Dagenham_
- in this ward there are 26 people aged 80
- 40% of people over 65 have an internet-connected phone
- therefore 10 of these 80-year-olds would be likely to receive a
broadcast
- (repeat for all other ages)
These numbers won’t be exact, but should be enough to give people a feel
for the severity of what they’re about to do. We can see if they acheive
this aim in user research.
1. This is a proxy for the number of people who are likely to have a 4G
capable phone, because only 4G capable phones will be receiving
broadcasts to begin with
