8.5 Discussion template
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…
Lotusphere online
Lotusphere online has been available for several days. Although I’ve still not been sent an email informing me that it’s live (just like last year), unlike last year my email and confirmation number work. A number of features are created using XPage technology and this is the first application I’ve seen that uses this functionality. I’ve mentioned that I’m concerned that XPages will provide Domino designers with tools that they might use that caused them to embed an accessibility time-bomb into their company’s intranets. So I thought I’d take a brief look at how accessible this IBM site is and knocked up a quick video walk through.
“We Are Unable to Accept Your Lotusphere 2009 Birds-of-a-Feather abstract”
This year I put in two Lotusphere abstracts, a BOF and presentation on ‘accessible web design‘. To be honest neither abstract was very good having been put together at the last minute. If I’m honest, I’m relieved that I won’t have the worry of presenting and can just relax and enjoy the week. But I’m always uncomfortable attending conferences when I’m not presenting, especially at such an expensive conference (why doesn’t IBM sponsor educational establishments – most academic conferences are half the price of this one?) Accessibility is extremely important in my job. A large proportion of ‘Web 2.0’ sites are designed without any real consideration of accessible design and I have a concern that Domino 8.5 will encourage the Domino community into adopting Web 2.0 technologies without understanding the problems they might be creating. When I was a design student I visited the ‘Royal National Institute for the Blind’…