A survey by WebAIM on how users of screen readers interact with web pages is worth a read. It gives a small insight into how screen reader users navigate around pages and some of the problems they face. The survey failed to clarify the term Web 2.0 so the survey hasn’t helped to understand if AJAX based sites disenfranchise partially sighted users but it does confirm some of the advice accessibility experts make. It also reinforces some of the point I tried to make to the Domino developers at Lotusphere about where the new XPage technology fails to meet basic accessibility criteria, namely that screen reader users use the page’s semantics to navigate around the page. A good practice that XPage authoring using the visual interface fails to support.
When html was originally specified it was intended to be a docuument markup language and the tags selected define the page’s content – headings, paragraphs, lists, etc. As web developers we all know this, it’s really basic stuff.
Since headings are more important than paragraphs, a significant percentage of screen reader users use headings to quickly navigate around sections of the page and this confirms the advice accessibility experts have been giving for years. Define a readable document and then style it to look like an application. XPages gets this fundamentally wrong and provides no visual tools to generate standard page markup, a glaring omission that no other editor that I’m aware off fails to include.
All’s not lost. If you want to develop a semantic page it’s just a case of switching to code view and you can add normal markup and it wouldn’t take much for Lotus to add some simple page editing tools.
Hopefully surveys like this help developers see how some simple changes to their pages can make page browsing easier for a small forgotten number of web users
Posted in Accessibility, Domino, Web Design, XPages
Ok, now this is beyond a joke. Sorry, but Domino 8.5 is going to be an accessibility nightmare. I know the discussion template is used many many companies and I’ve seen some University’s base their discussion facilities on this template (not us, we wrote our own), but the new template makes NO ATTEMPT to be accessible, both from point of view of handling javascript or by using semantic HTML.
Sean Cull has kindly left his 8.5 discussion template open for us to play with.
If you’ve got Firefox with the web developer tool bar installed. Switch off css
Notice how the page just collapses into a mess. None of the generally accepted conventions for semantic pages have been obeyed (such as marking up related links as lists).
It’s even worse if you switch off javascript. Although many of the advanced screen readers such as JAWS, integrate with Internet Explorer and deal with certain types of Javascript events, it’s generally accepted in accessibility circles that wherever possible, web developers should attempt to make as much of the page work without javascript as possible. In fact nothing in the discussion template works without javascript. All the links are to ‘#’ with the clicks being handled through events. Why, when there’s a document stored in the database is it now possible to show the document when javascript is switched off.
If the template demonstrated significant usability improvements over the existing template it would almost be acceptable, but the template is very basic. Where’s the different view modes such as viewing discussions as linear threads or the ability to filter discussions to the current conversation (i.e. limiting the view to the direct reply hierarchy). Where’s the facility to view the message you’re writing your reply to? Where’s the lookup when tags are added?
A core template such as this, should be accessible. If I was evaluating this product for use within the University it would not make it past the tender. It would fail on every accessibility point. Sorry, it’s simply that bad.
Posted in Domino, Web Design
I’ve been using lipsum.com for years to generate lipsum text for page mock-ups. HTML-Ipsum is a really simple site that takes lipsum generation one step further. This site generates html based lipsum but includes useful mark-up such as bullet lists, paragraphs and headers, allowing you to quickly preview the styles you’re applying to your website.
Posted in Web Design