Accessibility issues with code-output
Posted: Fri Jan 06, 2006 5:33 pm
Finally I found some time to write down some issues I had when setting up the NatKo project as well as with Ansichtssache / Viewpoint.
All of the below is related to the output, not the backend. However, quite a lot of modules are affected and I try to explain the reasons:
Regards,
Nils
All of the below is related to the output, not the backend. However, quite a lot of modules are affected and I try to explain the reasons:
- Navigation
Using the bulletmenu for navigation it was quite complex to make it work according to W3C WCAG. If you follow a link and get to the respective page, the link must not be active, i.e. it must not even be a link. However there is another issue with this as WCAG says that a user has to clearly identify where he / she is within the website. I hacked my way through it, but not very modular ... it just works. - Sitemap / Breadcrumb
Same rules as for navigation: Had to hack my way through it to make it work. Seems to apply to all kinds of navigation mechanisms used in CMSMS. Something I really miss is the possibility to have extra fields in the content-section where you could specify values for additional attributes like title if you link to this website from sitemap, breadcrumb, navigation, etc. - Form fields
Forms are pretty difficult - at least in the beginning. All forms used within CMSMS that I have seen so far do not conform to WCAG. There are certain tags, such as fieldset, legend and label that must be used. Took me quite a bit to get this working. Especially in modules such as bookmarks, etc. - WYSIWYG editor
I am still waiting for Xinha to be integrated into CMSMS. Actually most customers are overwhelmed by the possibilities offered in FCK or other editors. So I used widgEditor but this one does not work with CMSMS image manager and link manager. And it did not support use of smarty-tags in the content field. While I got the latter working with lots of efforts, I was not able to integrate image- and link manager. But a good WYSIWYG editor with valid source-output would be really good. When it comes to ATAG later (hopefully) this will be the most crucial point. - Search / Search results
While there was not integrated search I hacked together a script consisting of multiple solutions. The output of search-results therefore was a bit tricky. The user should be able to sort the results according to his / her needs. Couldn't get that working within my projects. However I mangaged to generate an ordered list for output. But something more sophisticated for search input and output would be highly recommended. - News / Events
Both modules were kind of buggy when I used them. Don't know if the handling is better now. Had to hack my way through the scripts to get rid of and all kinds of rubbish code in there. Not very semantic. Especially events. Had to recode the list-output so that it renders without tables but with definition lists. The calendar itself should be a data-table and marked-up as such. - Clean-URLs
One of the things I could not get rid off were messy URLs when using modules. I would highly appreciate a solution for clean URLs - maybe someone comes up with a good idea. - Just one wish ...
It would be pretty cool to have Tidy integrated into CMSMS, maybe even within the pre-render process to validate the source, remove unwanted elements and do stuff like that. As far as I'm concerned I know my tools and manage to validate a page. But most end-users of CMSMS don't. And they might need some help.
Regards,
Nils