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
Accessibility, Domino, Web Design, XPages
Accessibility, Domino, Web Design, XPages
Flickr is 5 years old today
I’m really glad Flickr has survived and grown from strength to strength.
For me, Flickr is the perfect ‘Web 2.0′ website. It doesn’t throw lots of rotating wait icons all over the place. It only uses dynamic features when they benefit the user and it’s inline editing is implemented perfectly.
Powerful but easy to use – I can’t give it a more glowing review than that.
Domino
Flickr
Ok, I’ve been using Domino long enough to know that templates don’t do what you think they should do so I shouldn’t really be surprised.
I had a problem with document locking. Some documents couldn’t be edited because there were some temporary locks being set and my code didn’t unlock them. Okay, my code was at fault, I’d accidentally allowed temporary locks when the administration server was unavailable, but since our servers only get rebooted once a week about 2 in the morning and the documents in question were created during the day, I shouldn’t have been seeing temporary locks.
On further investigation it appears that reason temporary locks were being set was because there was no administration server set in the ACL. This was despite the fact I had set one in the template the database was created from.
I’ve never understood why some features are inherited at creation and others aren’t. If the tick option for document locking is inherited and designed to use the administration server to ensure locking in a cluster, is it wrong of me to think that this should also be inherited from the template?
Domino
Domino
….you’re stuck in a lift and you have a hashtag created for the occasion:
Stephen Fry stuck in a lift (#frylift)
Social Networking, Twitter
Twitter
They’ve announed the Windows 7 lineup claiming it offers ‘clear choice for consumers and business’. It appears they haven’t learnt from their mistakes?
They claim that the streamlined ‘clear choice’ is a choice between ‘Home Premium’ and ‘Professional’.
But reading further they mention that they’ll continue to offer enterprises the Enterprise edition and ‘Home Basic’ for the emerging world. Plus there will also be a ’Windows Starter Edition’ limited to specific types of hardware.
Obviously for the ‘customers who want everything Windows 7 has to offer’, they’ll also be offering Windows 7 Ultimate.
So Microsoft’s ‘streamlined’ lineup is:
- Starter
- Home Basic
- Home Premium
- Professional
- Enterprise
- Ultimate
Apple with Snow Leopard will be offering a single edition. Why buy a crippled, buggy, tacky OS when you can buy from Apple?
Microsoft
Apple, Microsoft
My photos from Lotusphere have already been added to the Lotusphere flickr group, ( as p_a_h) but I’ve just uploaded a bunch of Lotusphere related videos to Youtube:
All videos except ‘Mustang Sally’, were created with the new iMovie ’09. I installed it earlier today and as you can see it’s very easy to use and my first impressions are that it’s a big improvement over ’08. If you’ve a Mac user who plays with video, but not seriously enough to warrant Final Cut, it’s definitely worth upgrading to.
Apple, Lotusphere
Lotusphere 2009
