I need to implement some WCAG 2.0 guidelines into a Joomla webpage. I've read a lot about this guidelines on W3C, but the problem is that I really don't know where to start. Please help!
I'd suggest starting by looking at Drupal's example - http://drupal.org/about/accessibility
Probably most interesting would be the issue queue:
http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?issue_tags=accessibility
It's a big challenge. Best to work with others in the Joomla community as there are no quick fixes.
Do not get lost in the Ambiguous 780 pages from W3C WCAG, i can not shake the feeling that if one needs that many pages to implement something in HTML, your doing it wrong (do you know a 780page doc for HTML?), a good title therefor IMO would be; "how-to make web-accessibility not accessible, by W3C".
I would recommend the following article:
https://patstapestry.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/tips-and-tricks-for-website-accessibility-testing-with-the-screen-reader-jaws/
following her guidelines you can try tackle the specific problems your pages may have, one-by-one
Also test with NVDA, TalkBack and VoiceOver;
http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey6/
Related
I need a very lightweight discussion board for joomla 3.0. You should be able to enter a topic, name and message. I want people to be able to comment on the topics too. I do not want a full-fledged forum, just very basic.
The extensions I've found are all too advanced.
I'm thinking of two way to do this. Either by a custom form which submits an article in which comments are allowed, then i show them in a category listing. That would be great, but I'm not sure where to start to make that happen. I have some basic programming skills if needed.
The other way would be with a content creation extension I think? But since the ones I've looked at cost money I cant just test them and see if it works.
Any ideas?
A forum is definitely too heavy for what you need. You might be better off looking at the Blog category on the Joomla Extensions Directory. As you're using Joomla 3.0, you are a little more limited as to which extension you can use, however there are still a few:
Commercial:
EasyBlog
RSBlog
Non-Commerial:
CjBlog
JUBlog
As a second resourt, you could try using Komento
Hope this helps
I cant decide between this two options.
M Project vs Sproutcore
I'm building an application that will be primary served on mobile but has to be viable on desktop.
Mproject is on the edge with number and variability of his prebuilded widgets and may happen that I will need some more or at least alter some behavior.
So this is kind of down side of Mproject. But it looked for first review that Mproject need less code for basic stuff.
And the second problem comes with the skins. I will basicaly need reskin everything a lot. The design of app has to be very unique.
So I want to know which of them is easily to reskin not just by theme-roller and similar stuff.
I would appreciate any other JavaScript-only frameworks recommendations.
Thanks for all replies.
I'm not sure what kind of application are you building so you should take care with my answer.
M-Project solved our problems fine, and help us to make it clear code ... when you understand how it works. It requires a bit of hard work, the documentation is a bit poor and is a new project where some things are not yet implemented. You can change application look modifying HTML and CSS so I think you should have no problems with this.
Also you can download their code and modify it without problems, it is easy to read and modify if you need any specific behavior.
On other side, I never used Sproutcore, it have a really nice look. But documentation say it is focused on desktop applications. Probably you will not have too much problems to adapt the output HTML for mobile devices, I guess.
Lastly, I think you can take a look on Lungo.js Framework.
Best regards.
I am a CS grad student, and I am interested in spending some spare time in getting involved with development of Mozilla Firefox web browser . I would like to contribute to HTML renderer , JavaScript engine etc. But I don't have any solid experience in writing parsers or similar stuff, and I don't have any clue from where to start.
There are of course some links in https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Developer_Guide/ but since Firefox is already is very huge project, I don't know from where I should start learning.
So, my question is what core things I need to learn first to get started with Web browser Development and from where I can learn this (any links)? Do I have to revise how to write parsers/compilers? How do I learn to write HTML renderer/ JavaScript engine? Is it even possible considering they are already very huge projects? Sometime back, I downloaded source code of V8 JavaScript engine (http://code.google.com/p/v8/) but I couldn't understand much from it's source code as it was highly optimized code, and there were no much useful comments for beginner like me to understand what going on.
Update:
I am fairly comfortable working with C, C++, Java, PHP, C#, VB.Net, JavaScript and I am more interested in learning how web browser parses an web page, how it constructs and maintains the DOM, how CSS is applied, how HTML reflow engine works, how it interacts with JavaScript engine, how it interacts with web server, how the components are drawn on the screen etc.
Read the docs on getting started. Hang out on irc.mozilla.org in #developers and watch for interesting conversations. Introduce yourself in #introduction and ask questions. Go to http://bugzilla.mozilla.org and start searching for open bugs in components that sound interesting, then look for bugs that catch your fancy. Use tools like http://mxr.mozilla.org/ and http://dxr.mozilla.org to help you locate the relevant code, and ask questions in #developers. Learn, hack, repeat.
I wrote a post about my experiences getting involved over the past year, and it seems to reflect the path that a significant amount of Mozilla developers took.
You might want to review a list of known bugs and see if you're able to fix them. Other possible way to get a foot in the door is to get involved in quality assurance tasks, which would help you learn better internals of the application.
Bugs marked in Bugzilla with the [good first bug] whiteboard status are a good place to start. You can view the list here.
Find something you like and try to fix it! The developers on IRC (#developers in irc.mozilla.org) are usually happy to help when you get stuck.
If you are interested in parsing, learn finite state automata and formal gramars, it should be part of your CS curriculum at some point, like in a compilers class. For the javascript part, study about JIT compilers, specially on how a tracing JIT works. Follow Mozilla development blogs, here is a good starting article:
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/03/a-quick-note-on-javascript-engine-components/
Finally, but not least importantly, try to contact people already working there, and try to build a mentor-pupil relationship, they can assign you tasks and can help if you get stuck when working on the code. Going to opensource conferences is a great way to meet the people behind a project and get started contributing.
Mozilla Developer Guide
I am looking for nice looking sites that are good in terms of look and feel as well as usability.
Someone had to say it: Stack Overflow!
Seriously - it may not be immediately beautiful to look at, but for what it is, and for its target audience and how they use it, it's a great example of both visual design and interaction design.
The layout, the use of colour, the sensible use of AJAX, the lack of fancy graphics, all give a good experience IMHO.
It's also a good example of how to incorporate advertising in an effective but unobtrusive way.
Google.
It gets out of the way as much as possible and lets you focus on doing what you came there to do.
I think this is question is much like Share good examples of Web-GUIs question that was post in the site sometime ago. probably it will help you.
Zen Garden - beauty but especially showing you what different things can be done with pure accessible HTML. So having Usability in mind as well.
I don't know what kind/segment of site you want. But I`ll mention one that is kind of site to create site that helped me to create fast and beautiful things.
www.snappages.com is a example of nice/easy/friendly/pretty/dummyFriendly/niceExamples/easyToCreatePrettyThings/easyToMaintain/etc...
I really think that is a 'must know place'
Cheers :)
I think gmail is an example of a very usable UI.
I've always found that other people's great web sites are more of an inspiration than a practical help. Every site has particular needs. For example, this site is good for what it does, but it really isn't a site I need to build; likewise for this one and this one.
I think it is valuable to develop a philosophy/aesthetic for this, or at least be conversant with those who think a lot about design and accessibility. Here are two sites with some serious discussion along these lines, along with some coding howto:
http://stopdesign.com/
http://www.456bereastreet.com/
But even these reflect my personal taste. There are people in my family who really like Club Penguin. And I hear some folks can tolerate MySpace.
Jeff mentioned the concept of 'Progressive Enhancement' when talking about using JQuery to write stackoverflow.
After a quick Google, I found a couple of high-level discussions about it.
Can anyone recommend a good place to start as a programmer.
Specifically, I have been writing web apps in PHP and would like to use YUI to improve the pages I am writing, but a lot of them seem very JavaScript based, with most of the donkey work being done using JavaScript. To me, that seems a bit overkill, since viewing the site without Javascript will probably break most of it.
Anyone have some good places to start using this idea, I don't really care about the language.
Ideally, I would like to see how you start creating the static HTML first, and then adding the YUI (or whatever Ajax framework) to it so that you get the benefits of a richer client?
As you've said
To me, that seems a bit overkill, since viewing the site without Javascript will probably break most of it.
This isn't progressive enhancement. Progressive enhancement is when the site works perfectly without JavaScript or CSS, and then adding (layering) these extra technologies/code to increase the usability and functionality of the website.
The best example I can give is the tag input box on this website. With JavaScript turned off, it would still work allowing you to enter tags separated with a space. With JavaScript turned on, you get a drop down with suggestions of previous entries.
This is progressive enhancement.
See also Unobtrusive JavaScript which is the bedrock progressive enhancement is built.
Going at it from the other direction is sometimes referred to as graceful degradation. This is usually needed when the site is built first with the enhanced functionality afforded by the various technologies then modified to degrade gracefully for browsers with those technologies are not available.
It is also graceful degradation when designing to work with older browsers (ancient in the Internets terminology) such as IE 5.5, Netscape, etc...
In my opinion it is much more work to gracefully degrade the application. Progressively enhancing it tends to be much more efficient; however, sometimes the need to take an existing app and make it accessible in these lacking environments arise.
Basically, if your site still works with JavaScript turned off, then anything you add with JavaScript can be considered progressive enhancement.
Some people may think that this is unnecessary, but plenty of people browse with addons like NoScript (or, with JavaScript simply turned off in their browser settings). In addition, many Mobile web browsers may or may not support JavaScript. So, it's always a good idea to test your site completely with and without JavaScript.
Progressive Enhancement is a development technique that stresses the primacy of the semantic HTML, then testing for browser-capability and conditionally "layering" on JavaScript and/or CSS enhancements for the browsers that can utilize those enhancements.
One of the keys is understanding that we're testing for what the browser can do, as opposed to browser-sniffing. Modernizr is a very popular browser-capability test suite.
Progressive-Enhancement is inherently (section 508) accessible; it provides for meeting the letter of the law and the spirit of the rule.
The Filament Group wrote the excellent "Designing With Progressive Enhancement" book on the subject. (I am not affiliated with Filament Group, though they are so freaking smart I wish I were.)
This is such an important concept and it saddens me that so few web developers understand it.
Basically, start by building a site/framework in Plain Old HTML -- structural elements, links and forms. Then add on some style and then shiny stuff (Ajax or what have you).
It's not very difficult. Like palehorse says, graceful degradation is more work.
Websites should work in any user agent, not look the same (not even look but sound if your vision impaired), just work.
Progressive Enhancement:
The plain HTML/CSS site is awesome (fully working and user-friendly).
Adding JavaScript defines a new level of awesome.