Openlibrary: Add book titles to carousels (Vote)

[mekarpeles]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Should we add titles beneath our carousels? Especially when a book has a non-descript bookcover, it's difficult to tell what the book is.

Examples

Stakeholders

Stakeholders: @jdlrobson, @koderjoker, @hornc, @charstarstars, @seabelis

[jdlrobson]

How will we deal with long titles/authors? I expect this will need some kind of fixed height to work. e.g. ...

[LeadSongDog]

@jdlrobson Can't the alt text be set to the full title and author, and then rendered by a browser as hovertext or read aloud?

[mekarpeles]

@LeadSongDog I don't think this is a viable option for mobile users.

@jdlrobson not sure yet, one proposal was removing the read buttons to make room for title / author.

[jdlrobson]

The read buttons are a little repetitive. This would reduce visual clutter
but we'd still need to truncate or shrink longer titles to retain the fixed
card format.

On Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:04 AM Michael E. Karpeles [e-mail]
wrote:

@LeadSongDog https://github.com/LeadSongDog I don't think this is a
viable option for mobile users.

@jdlrobson https://github.com/jdlrobson not sure yet, one proposal was
removing the read buttons to make room for title / author.

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[LeadSongDog]

@mekarpeles Agree it only mostly helps accessibility on desktops and screenreaders, but it does not degrade the mobile rendering either.
{revised 12/12/2019}:
Turns out there are numerous TTS apps for both iOS and Android:
http://dyslexiahelp.umich.edu/tools/software-assistive-technology/text-to-speech-readers
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/4-text-to-speech-apps-that-will-read-online-articles-to-you/
https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/speechify-text-to-speech/id1209815023
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hyperionics.avar&hl=en
https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-read-aloud-text-in-Chrome-for-Android-using-TTS

[seabelis]

I'd try to keep titles to 2 or 3 lines; maybe have a character count limit followed by ... when exceeded? Perhaps the year is not necessary.

[LeadSongDog]

Related: #496 #837 #841 #1005 #2368
Discussions on these issues identified several problems ancillary to their main thrust that never got their own issues.
@mekarpeles I like your idea of showing a title below the cover. It is a useful way to make alt-text more normalized, not requiring a hover action to display it. It is also good for low-bandwidth usage where images are expensive or blocked. For mobile usage, perhaps the alt-text could crawl through a one-line window below a (static) cover image, as on cable news?

[seabelis]

Would it be possible to do something like this, not auto-scrolling (and not circles), but displaying a central image with details and borrow link? We shouldn't rely on covers to provide the title as plenty of legit covers don't have one, but I think it may look cluttered to show so much information all at once. http://demo7.dnngo.net/20047/en-us/sliders/contentslider.aspx
Or maybe some kind of mouseover action: http://demo7.dnngo.net/20047/en-us/sliders/carousel.aspx

[jdlrobson]

Is there a decision here? #2368 has been reopened, but if we want to add titles per this task it doesn't make sense to invest time in that ticket.

[BrittanyBunk]

@mekarpeles your setup duplicates a lot - which makes it harder to read (but no worry: I have a solution for simplicity) @cdrini @leadsongdog this is a recurring issue (and I thought I provided my input in the past to #2368 especially, but I don't see it on github - maybe slack?), so here's my thoughts:

• Main site: the selection for book covers should have the title and author clearly visible, preferably with a picture that visually describes what the book's about and differentiates it from other editions
• Mobile: have the cover image and when a person taps it, it'd display (as an overlay over the cover, making the cover go opaque in the back behind): the 1) title, 2) read/borrow button, 3) details button.

Vision:

It's clear to see that the first cover shows exactly what's going on with the title, imaging, and even the author (although that's smaller), the 2nd cover is what I'd imagine for mobile (it would be more centered than what's shown here, but I'm too lazy to redo it - just pretend for now :)).

[seabelis]

Overdrive's approach omits subtitles and if the title is longer than one line, uses ... .

No significant difference on mobile; just fewer items displayed on carousel.

[BrittanyBunk]

Although to me, there's too much added with Overdrive (which is why I tend not to use it much), they do use titles, which I do think is important. Plus, it has the 'borrow' button. One thing that is interesting and not really noticeable, but important in the picture is the bookmark icon. I think that's kind of cool and wouldn't be too much to add in.