Who You Calling a Jesse?

“I don’t use UW Web Pages”

As part of an ongoing process to improve the usability and accessibility of the UW home page, I met with two students on Friday that rely upon adaptive technology to navigate the web. There were three main topics discussed:

1. The UW home page was updated recently, have you noticed any improvements?
2. General web browsing: how do you navigate the web, what do you like about web sites, what don’t you like?
3. Do you have specific issues with the adaptive technology you rely upon?

What struck me right away was the response to the first question – “I don’t use UW web pages because they are so bad.” I then asked what makes them so bad? “JAWS reads everything so it is hard to use anything.” I also received comments about the menus all being in javascript which are useless to JAWS. The other student uses ‘text zoom’ to access pages but remarked the drop downs were frustrating because “If I just moved the mouse a little bit in the wrong place I had to start over again.”

I had some idea how bad things were, I have gone through pages with JAWS and watched one of the students navigate with it. What I really had no idea about is how these students blame JAWS not the web developer yet they do not complain. I wonder how many others out there have problems with web pages and don’t complain?

I suggested to the students that they take a look at the new UW web pages and get back to me. That will be posted. I also let them know that at the bottom of UW web pages is a ‘feedback’ link. If they have a problem with any content (PDF’s, and Word Docs included) they should complain. I know its hard for web folks to separate the whinge from the constructive complaint, but web folks on campus should pay attention to their feedback. If you run into a problem you can’t figure out a solution to please email me.

We did talk about other things and I have a few ideas and features to implement for the home page. There was a request for something like the Zoom Layout Joe Clark talked about at the @media 2005 conference and has recently received a lot of blog attention. As well as a contrast switching option. Just sketching out how to implement these ideas.

Oddly enough, last week saw a massive blog outpour of accessibility talk. Notable posts include the formation of the Accessibility Task Force,ATF task list by Joe,Veerle’s point of view, and the role of government in web accessibility.

Protecting Email Addresses from Malicious Spiders

Malicious spiders can be the reason for spam emails. Any email address given out in the standard user@domain.com is vulnerable. One website where I’ve addressed this issue is the Newsrelease website. This page is especially vulnerable since email addresses of different contacts are published here.

When spam-proofing emails, ideally the following should be satisfied:

• the email should not be easily retreivable from the source HTML
• the email should be accessible visually
• the email should be accessible contextually, ie clickable
• the technology used in the process should not completely exclude browsers which don’t support the technology or have it disabled, ie offer these visitors an alternative way to read/access the email address

I used the method of spam-proofing the emails offerred in the comments section here. The idea is simpe:

1. Use javascript to hide the email address inside the source by concatenating parts of the email addresses and then outputting it to the browser using the document.write function
2. Account for the browsers which don’t support javascript or have it disabled by displaying a phonetic email address

You can see it in action here. This is however a static page and I did not have any trouble with it. You can see that the source does not have the email address in the form user@domain.com. I used two different methods for the two emails so that it can serve as an example of how to do the same thing in two different ways using the php script.

More troublesome were the actual news articles which are dynamically generated such as this one and this one. Because of the way news.php works, I also had to change the way the function that generates the javascript snippet to make it work with changing emails in a huge text block. The actual code can be easily examined in news/news.php, news/reach.php and the function itself in the php include: news/inc/printEmail.php .

Centering web pages… the easy way

I had a great lesson in simplicity this week thanks to the centering of UW pages in the CLF issue. For the UW home page I used the technique described on Maxdesign. What this technique requires is a div#container for it to work. This is great but when it comes to the XTHML/CSS that runs the CLF this requires a number of changes that include:

• modify body tag to center text
• insert container div to CSS and XHTML
• modify right nav values
• modify #uwlogo values
• some other thing I can’t recall

In order for it to work on your CLF based pages you would need to:

• insert a div tag below the body and close it before /body
• update your template if you didn’t use server side includes

Well after yesterday’s session, Kevin Paxman (Graphics) emails me:

Maybe I’m missing something…but this worked for me as far as I could tell, with 5 minutes of testing in PCIE 6 and Firefox…

 
body {
 margin: 0 auto;
 position: relative;
}

Then the rest of the position: absolute’s can stay. I didn’t fiddle with PCIE<6, but it should degrade to left aligned gracefully, or you could text-align: center the body and text-align: left the necessary DIVs?

Guess what? It works. AHS and others have implemented this in their custom.css and it works like a charm. So what is the workflow now?

For Web Ops:

• insert margin and position elements to UWblank.css

For you:

• nothing.

Wow. Lesson learned, simple solutions often are the best. Now I am not entirely sure why that works for UW CLF based pages. I would think it was too simple, something must be wrong. But it works.

One thing: Watch the tags above your doctype – they throw IE into quirks mode and that is bad. So please make sure no tags come above the doctype.

Another thing: Some on a certain mail list have asked why position:relative in the body tag? Because if I don’t the UW logo will float to the left. The code is valid though.

Yet another thing: Seems Dreamweaver and Contribute don’t like this technique. Working a solution for those tools.

Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act becomes Law in Ontario

WATS.ca is reporting that the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act has become Law in Ontario. Some big changes (thanks Derek) are:

• It applies to the private sector.
• Enforcement of the law is now possible for both the public and private sector.
• Timelines for compliance based on a number of factors, but there will be different timelines for different things. (guess is 1-3 yrs for web).

So what does this mean for UW web pages? Unsure as yet. Government people have yet to be put in place and other things decided. I would expect a trickle over the summer… shall try to stay updated. Right now it doesn’t mean a whole lot. The CLF introduces a new standards based solution for web pages and a templating scheme that will make accessibility based additions very easy. Office for Person’s with Disabilities along with other groups on campus will be looking at accessibility and the legislations impact on campus over the coming months.

The trick for now will be in your content. How you code, what you code, how do you refer to .ppt’s, PDF’s, .doc’s, Flash, etc. I am currently working on a style guide that includes a mark-up guide, CSS naming conventions, and best practices for referring to other document types. Expect to see pieces of it up shortly in draft form.

This was updated after a discussion with Rose Padacz, Director of the Office for Person’s with Disabilities.

Acccessibility and JavaScript from a UW Alumni

Worth a mention outside of just listing links since Derek Featherstone is a UW Alumni. Derek has a post on his blog that clarifies some points in his presentation this past week at the @media 2005 conference. JavaScript and Accessibility is a good read even if you didn’t go to the conference. After SXSW 2005 and doing a guest instructor gig at the Knowbility’s Accessibility University, he now is offering classes in the UK.

Derek was featured in the Alumni e-newsletter in Feb 2004 – check it out if you want to know who this guy is