I've received a report that the sun icon at the top of some forums, including the regional forums, causes problems for users who rely on screenreaders to access the site. I believe the problem is that the sun is not accompanied by text (or just the letter "G") to identify it.
Screenreaders cannot interpret the Google calendar at the top of a forum, so visually impaired Wrimos don't have full access to information about local meet-ups, unless the ML provides a text-only version.
I don't have details, but the participant also reports that validating novels is difficult - the upload pages are too difficult to use.
The participant who contacted me suggested that we research the w3c worldwide accessibility guidelines.
HQ says that the now have someone consulting with them on usability issues for the visually impaired, and that consultant reports that the store is much more usable than before. Hooray! Also, HQ says that we will take feedback to heart when we are able to implement redesigns to the NaNo site.
I'm posting to make sure this information is available when we are able to address this topic. Thanks!
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ML Captain of Capital Ideas & Austin, TX Municipal Liaison
53,387 / 50,000
Okt 16, 2009 - 15 27
Thanks for the summary; last year I put in a request to have some of these changes made. I'm fairly sure I detailed the accessibility issues of the validation process; I'll go in and see if I can update that ticket to be a higher priority. I'd like to see it fixed before official validation opens. In the mean time, even if it's not, I'll offer the same thing we did last year to those who were unable to validate for accessibility reasons; I'll take care of it myself if you'll contact me.
I'll look into the sun icon, I may be able to fix that myself. I believe it's added manually to the forum descriptions, in which case adding alt text to that image is no trouble. Good web design demands that all images have alt text for accessibility purposes;
----------Heather Dudley
Forums Moderator
Liquid Story Binder, on sale for 50% off during November!
A Dragon Writes
53,387 / 50,000
Okt 16, 2009 - 15 35
Does the sun icon not have alt text in the regional forums? I checked the All Ages coffeehouse, and it includes the alt text; it may not be universally applied, though.
----------Heather Dudley
Forums Moderator
Liquid Story Binder, on sale for 50% off during November!
A Dragon Writes
51,000 / 50,000
Okt 16, 2009 - 16 37
My regional forum has alt text for the sun. I'm not sure what the problem is there. Is it possible screenreaders can't read alt text?
----------ML Captain of Capital Ideas & Austin, TX Municipal Liaison
53,387 / 50,000
Okt 16, 2009 - 16 59
Hmm; they're supposed to be able to; that's one of the reasons we web designers are taught to use it. When alt text is present, the screen reader is supposed to be able to replace the image with the alt text.
----------Heather Dudley
Forums Moderator
Liquid Story Binder, on sale for 50% off during November!
A Dragon Writes
43,098 / 50,000
Okt 27, 2009 - 14 13
I am glad you guys came forward and spoke up about this issue. I wanted to get my deafblind community involved on here, but they have said that they can't access the site because of all the formatting issues. Some also rely on using braille to read online, so there's that population too. I'm just lucky that I don't often need to use any zoom. But when I do, when I use the Ctrl + to increase font size, the top of every page in this site is horribly mangled. The links, text and graphics all meld together.
Anyway, I can't wait for a more accessible site!
----------Kiley, FMC with a Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder)
Number of Alters so far: 14
Number of Alters dead: 7
43,601 / 50,000
Okt 27, 2009 - 21 00
Riniuiop, what OS and browser are you using? I tried Ctrl + in both FireFox 3.5.3 and IE8, and because both now use a zoom by default (rather than only changing text size, they expand everything on the page), everything does show correctly across the site on both browsers for me when zoomed in, including all the menus across the top, and I did test across several different pages.
----------2008: Painted Souls
2009: The Black War
43,098 / 50,000
Nov 5, 2009 - 16 24
I am using using Ubuntu Linux (latest one) and Firefox (latest one as well), though, that doesn't make much sense. I did see a few browsers where it increases the size of everything. But not in my case either on my EEE with Firefox or my Ubuntu on my laptop. Only the font size changes.
----------Kiley, FMC with a Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder)
Number of Alters so far: 14
Number of Alters dead: 7