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.

I’m a big Led Zeppelin fan and I was lucky enough to get a ticket to their reunion gig. Imagine my joy when boarding my British Airways flight to Orlando to discover a certain Robert Plant on my flight. I’m not the sort of person who normally gets star struck so walked past him as I ventured through Business class to my cattle-class seat. But by the end of the flight I had decided it would have been rude not to thank Robert for the gig. Okay, I might have had to let my bag go around the carousel a number of times so that I could ‘accidentally’ bump into him to thank him, but it was great to meet one of my favourite artists.

Lotusphere 2008 was my first Lotusphere and I’m used to academic conferences that can be a bit of drag when you’re not presenting. But after meeting one of my idols, I knew Lotusphere was going to be good!

(Some friends falsely accuse me of being the reason why Zeppelin did not reform. I think this is grossly unfair. All I did was to suggest (blurt out) to Robert that whatever he decided the fans would accept his decision)

Most of know what we should be doing, but how many of do so – Best and Worst Practices, Lotusphere 2008