Hi !
My name is François Desplanques. I'm a french engineering student at Ensimag (Grenoble Institute of Technology). Our main fields are computing and mathematics.
I have just learnt about the GSoC last friday at a conference in my school lead by two participants in the previous session. I was really interested and I spent the week-end to choose an organization which reflects what I think.
I'm really glad to come here and try to participate at SilverStripe. Indeed I think the website is very important if you want to communicate, no matter the message you want to deliver. Helping people with an opensource software is amazing! Besides, I found one of your project for which I care a lot : Accessibility improvements for the CMS.
Dealing of my skills, I already had the occasion to manipulate HTML/CSS/JavaScript/PHP. I'm also connected to the medical field, which could let me meet some possible impaired users.
I have some ideas, which are mainly coming from the WCAG 2.0. Of course it may not be enough of a summer to get an AAA success criteria, but at first sight, I'll aim at a AA success criteria. Since I am a bit late by knowing just now the existence of the GSoC, I need to get more familiar with SilverStripe. That's the reason why I'll update this thread regularly until friday night. I hope you will be all able to help me if I have some questions.
Moreover, I am also going to do the PHP Coding Test.
Best regards,
François
Welcome to the SilverStripe community.
Looking forward to your application, three days to go! :)
Ingo
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Hi again! This time I will detail more my proposal.
I think they are two distinctions to do
in the task for accessibility : the admin board and the contains
of the website produced by the CMS.
Dealing with the admin board : I must confess that I did not know to much about WAI-ARIA. That's the reason why, my first reflex was to disable JavaScript on the panel. Unfortunately, it seems to be that the CMS can not work without JavaScript. I guess that you have made the board with JavaScript instead of enhancing a HTML version with it. Since I don't know yet how to set JavaScript for accessibility, I think it will be hard to really adapt the current panel to a version which will be for impaired users. I mean it's surely possible to do it but I think we will loose some of the beauty of the panel, which is really awesome yet !
Therefore, I am likely to propose a new version which will appear instead of the page error « The CMS requires that you have JavaScript enabled. ». At first, it would be a version without JavaScript at all. I would try to build it properly with the main aim : accessibility. The advantage of this method is that people who use JavaScript won't be bothered because they will not notice the second version, kind of hidden. Then to ensure that all disabled people can go to the version which is more practical for them, we could put a link from the original page.
More details about this HTML version : the text edit area would be a large text zone. The user could make some effects by using some tags. An anchor in the beginning of the page would help them to know precisely how to use tags. Anyways, every pages would have anchors to help them to go quickly on the data requested.
After the version without JavaScript written, we could enhance it with some JavaScript, keeping in mind the accessibility (by using WAI-ARIA). Finally, maybe we may desire to merge the two versions and produce some awesome things with WAI-ARIA if we got some skilled.
There are still some details which can be modified without changing the whole interface in order to get closer to the WCAG 2.0. It means that this details can be on both versions and are also available for the website produced by CMS. This list is not over and will surely be updated :
I have not checked yet the whole code, but I'm not sure that all the <span> have a semantic values here.
Labels seems quite good even if I saw, for the moment, one missing.
There should be texts describing pictures/medias. Maybe we could add this on the panel when uploading a file.
The keyboard navigation can be upgraded. We can add access keys and we can also propose to add them when creating the website in the panel.
I think that I must check every templates if I want to improve accessibility on the websites created by the CMS.
I would have also thought about vocal description. But it depends on the ability to people to hear. When this method is adapted, they have screen readers which already make the job. However it can be useful for audio-description with a video. But I will not make that point my priority since it's a AAA request and there is many to do before. It could be part of extensions if I finish on time.
As you may have noticed, I have to learn a lot. But it is work in progress and I don't think that is to much troubles because I'm hard-working and I can grep pieces of information. Of course I have the desire to share everything I would discover on this adventure. It won't be a problem for me to write down all my discoveries and knowledge on an overview document for modules later. I will also try to determinate which functions of which library is good with the accessibility.
Please, comment it as maximum as possible. It would be easier to adapt and develop. I also still have to familiarize more with SilverStripe code.
Dealing with the admin board : I must confess that I did not know to much about WAI-ARIA. That's the reason why, my first reflex was to disable JavaScript on the panel. Unfortunately, it seems to be that the CMS can not work without JavaScript. I guess that you have made the board with JavaScript instead of enhancing a HTML version with it. Since I don't know yet how to set JavaScript for accessibility, I think it will be hard to really adapt the current panel to a version which will be for impaired users. I mean it's surely possible to do it but I think we will loose some of the beauty of the panel, which is really awesome yet !
Therefore, I am likely to propose a new version which will appear instead of the page error « The CMS requires that you have JavaScript enabled. ». At first, it would be a version without JavaScript at all. I would try to build it properly with the main aim : accessibility. The advantage of this method is that people who use JavaScript won't be bothered because they will not notice the second version, kind of hidden. Then to ensure that all disabled people can go to the version which is more practical for them, we could put a link from the original page.
I think that I must check every templates if I want to improve accessibility on the websites created by the CMS.
I would have also thought about vocal description. But it depends on the ability to people to hear. When this method is adapted, they have screen readers which already make the job. However it can be useful for audio-description with a video. But I will not make that point my priority since it's a AAA request and there is many to do before. It could be part of extensions if I finish on time.
Hi there !
First of all, thank you very much Ingo to take the time to answer to my post. It was really how I imagine the GSoC and I'm enjoying it :) !
About what you told me : I must say that I was a bit skeptic about WEI-ARIA. Indeed many websites says that even with this new kind of rules, some user-agents and assistive technology are not yet configured to use it. However I had underestimate his power! I read a lot about it! It is very powerfull for disabled people and it's also the future of coding style! I'm so convinced!
I've put the simple theme by following the instruction of the readme. I don't see so much changes compare to the tutorial one. Did I miss something or is it normal ?
About some points of my proposal :
-Semantic
I think I'll check SilverStripe code as much as possible to see if semantic is well applied. I realized that at least one label is missing and some images must not have alt attribute. Indeed, I used the « Web developer » module of firefox and I could see that if you replace some images by their attribute alt, they just disappeared. So that's only examples of what I could see by checking the code. I think it will take me quite a few time to track all of those.
More than checking, I would like to enhance with some WEI-ARIA. For example, it's possible to communicate on the menu if tabs are open or closed. There is also something to do with the drag & drop reordering. First, it can be improve with some ARIA telling people what can be grabbed and what is the 'dropeffect'. Then I think it's also needed for motion-impaired users to have another way to reorganize pages. I'm not sure yet of the best way to doing that but I'm thinking of a keyboard navigation. We have to be sure that every list, every button, every link , everything follows the WEI-ARIA and it would be to much to develop it here now.
I've also downloaded NVDA, a free screen reader. I've tested if everything is readable or not. It's quite good for the whole site but the text area needs to have some enhancement. Indeed, each button has no audio description. Moreover, if we work with the simple theme, maybe we could transform a bit. Indeed buttons could create some tags. By this way, everyone could write directly the code. Those tags would have to respect the semantic. It would be nice (and faster) if someone could explain me what method you chose to use for the textarea (in order to know how we could transform it)
-Keyboard Navigation
Another point I will develop tonight is the keyboard navigation. I thought of using more the tabindex. I also consider to use negative values with it and use programming. I mean by this that tabulation must give a quick access to the main ideas of the page, which will be done by using positive and ordered tabindex. Then, we can use negative tabindex to navigate through the details with the arrows of the keyboard.
It could also be more accesskeys. There are already two presents in the textarea but they use letters. It is more difficult to use letters because they are sometimes associated with others commands. I think we could use numbers instead. Besides, those acceskesy should be declared by some WEI-ARIA.
The aim of that is to make the whole simple theme accessible with keyboards.
I'm sorry to answer this late. I hope
you will have time to read it. I must say that I'm still a student
and I have class the whole day :). Now it's time for me to keep going
on with the PHP coding test ^^.
Best regards,
François
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