Accessibility (or lack of)

ObeyGiant

Has anyone tried navigating boards.ie in a text-based (or, god forbid, speech-based) browser?
It's a horrible experience.
If the board you're looking for isn't on the list of "Lastest 20 threads..", you're out of luck, and have to go clicking through three pages to find the one page you are looking for. This is pushing it.

This is, of course, because boards uses a javascript menu for (pretty much) all navigation, without providing a seperate menu for those who can't use javascript.

How about providing a seperate menu? This is easily done without disrupting the 'flow' of the existing menu.

Taking the front page as an example, after the line that says

<script type="text/javascript" src="/javascript/dumpmenusDefault.js"></script>

you simply put

<noscript><a href="arts_board">Arts</a>
<br><a href="art_animation_board.html">- Art / Animation / Photo
....
</noscript>

Only those browsers that can't handle javascript (ie - text/speech-based browsers) will see the bit enclosed by the <noscript></noscript> tags

How about it?

DeadBankClerk

This is boards.ie as viewed in Links. The first pic is the main page, the second is this thread.

BTW: The pics are 16 colour greyscale .png and oddly enough the two of them take up less disk space than my sig (2x20k).

DeVore

How about we make an "Accessibility" Skin? We could tweak that further to help people who use such browsers.

I know Dan is looking at the scripts today so I'll bring his attention to this post.

DeV.

DeadBankClerk

Very good idea dev. And you could get rid of all the images too, like the smilies, post reply and post new thread buttons (i know they are tiny but they dont make sense when you are using a plain text browser.

seamus

Now that we're on this.....how abouts a wml version?

ObeyGiant

Originally posted by DeVore
How about we make an "Accessibility" Skin? We could tweak that further to help people who use such browsers.

Although this is a wonderful step forward, I think it's a little silly to neglect basic accessibility for the rest of the site, in favour of a "usable" section - especially after I pointed out how easily you can greatly improve the accessibility of the overall site.

My personal situation is that I use lynx at home, where my connection is poor at the best of times. This way I get reasonably speedy browsing, with very little fuss. The idea of switching skins each time I travel between work and home is ridiculous, especially when you consider the amount of work involved in creating an entire "accessible" skin (lots of work) vs the amount of work involved in reaching WAI priority one compliancy (very little work).

The beautiful thing about the WAI guidelines (especially when you don't go beyond priority one) is the fact that you can implement them without affecting the look and feel of the site for people who are using 'normal' browsers.

I think the best way I can hope to convince you of the importance of basic accessibility in the way I am suggesting is to give you a very likely (more than a lot of people would think) situation...
A blind person, using a screen-reader to navigate a website comes to boards.ie. If you were to limit the accessibility to a 'skin', how would you expect a new user to know this, and navigate his or her way to changing this skin?

Like I said - implementing basic accessibility is a trivial amount of work. Boards.ie is already given a small degree of usability by virtue of the fact that it is a simple site. However, it is extremely let down by the fact that none of the "img" tags have "alt=" flags, and the main nav menu is entirely javascript, with no text-based alternative.

Having said all this, it's entirely up to you. You are perfectly free to say "leave us alone, we're as accessible as we want to be". But I'll finish by saying this - an 'accessible skin' is about as useful as no accessibility at all.

STaN

it would be nice to access the boards from a wap phone tbh, duno how feasible that is...

also you could use nested tables that expand when you click on them for navigation instead of javascript, duno if that would work in a text based browser

DeVore

Woooah! ObeyGiant, the accessibilty skin was an idea in addition to improving the accessibility of the site (which, as Regi says, is on the list).

We're keen on the idea because many of us admins have had some contact with people who have special (simple!) needs in order to participate in the community.

Personally, since my father got involved with the Irish Spina-bifida society, I really see the value in the 'Net to those kids. Online they can be whoever they want without having people stare at them or TALK SL-OW-LY AND LOUDLY....

So, in short, we know we've work to do and I think Regi and Cloud are working on it. The changes to the nav should be easy enough, and I'll have a think about the special skin to make it better again.

DeV.

DeVore

Stan, The Corinthian has written a small program to display the last 10 posts on a wap phone. We're going to put it live soon (honest Corinth!).

I cant see any way I'd ever use it but *shrug* it costs us nothing to do it...

DeV.

Gordon

Using boards with lynx sure is a mad experience. It almost defeats the purpose as navigation takes up so much time.

Wouldn't a special trimmed down skin be the answer if using lynx? Cut away the pics, put more defined borders between posts type thing.

DeadBankClerk

lynx sucks!

links all the way!