dw_accessibility | Accessibility testing needed!

One awesome thing which has already come out of our association with Google Summer of Code is our introduction to the developers of Dojo, another open source project. Dojo is a JavaScript toolkit whose developers claim they are the first JavaScript toolkit with full accessibility support in their base widget set.

Using Dojo wouldn't be a trivial decision. Dreamwidth developers have put a lot of work into learning jQuery, and we don't want to move in entirely different direction and less there's a good reason.

So what would be fabulous is if we could get people really hammering on the widgets the Dojo people programmed to be accessible. Try them out -- are they accessible for you? Do they work with your needs, your adaptive technology, your browser? Are they intuitive?

At the same time, we should test the jQuery widgets, to see if we find those any more or less accessible.

This is a valuable test for everyone with any accessibility needs to do, whether you use adaptive technology or not.

I made a page on the wiki for JavaScript widget testing that links to all the tests we should do. There's a lot there! I don't expect anyone will do all of them; goodness knows I tuckered out about three quarters of the way through and I haven't even written up my test results. Still, if people could do some of these tests and report on how well they work for you, that would be totally awesome. You can report as comments to this post or in the various sections of that wiki page. I made sections called "results" after the link to each test, so you can just list the results you had for specific tests.

and thank you for anything you can do, even if it's only brief!

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I can't work on this for another week, but here . ..

Meet the Dojo accessibility lead. If you want to ask her specific questions I think I can make an introduction for you, we've been at the same conferences and are connected by a number of folks.

http://twitter.com/becka11y

Totally awesome! And I'd love that, if you have time.

Are these planned javascript widgets essential? I always have javascript turned off unless I absolutely have to have it on (such as to access a Youtube video). I would prefer to continue to function on DW sans javascript, even if it makes color-picking a pain.

Definitely not essential! Any JS widgets we'll put will be with an eye towards making things easier -- if the JS is making things harder, we'll fix it or drop it, but that's tangential to your point.

More to the point, underlying any widget will be some simple HTML form (possibly with a textual hint to the required format -- what will happen depends on the page/form). Some things won't be possible -- you can't have autocompleting tags on the update page for example -- but you'll always be able to just type in your tags.

I surf with NoScript blocking JS for most sites and while I trust DW and do allow JS here, I've been on my share of sites where JS was required for the most basic functionality to work, and that is always horrible. I feel strongly about this, and I'm (currently) the one coding the majority of new functionality that will use fancy JS: I hope that eases your mind some.

Which is not to say we'll get it perfect. If we overlook something I hope you'll be comfortable enough to point out that something is not working for you. But making sure basic functionality works, with or without JavaScript is not (will not be) an afterthought.

This is great to hear - I understand thath some of the (older?) Windows-based screen readers block JavaScript from working at all so it's definitely an accessibility issue to have it possible to do everything without it. I think everybody understands that the "magic" stuff (like tag autocomplete) needs JavaScript but as long as there's a "by hand" way (like typing in your tags) that's an acceptible and accessible alternative.

Cheers,
Ricky

*nod nods* I'm trying not to be too fierce here so I don't scare anyone away, but it is really hard for me to rein myself in, even though I'm basically preaching to the choir at this point *G*

Anyway, back to my coding for the update page before I disappear for the next week or so. Zoom zoom :)

(Oops that was me on the wrong account, sorry)

Thanks! This is indeed comforting. 8^) It rubs me the wrong way every time I wish to comment on a friend's blogspot journal that I'm obliged to allow javascript. I'm very relieved that DW is not going down that path.

frith: as long as the underlying HTML is setup correctly (as with any JS enhanced page), Dojo widgets will degrade gracefully.

While the term 'degrade' is worrisome, the cadence of your sentence is comforting. 8^)

Graceful degradation is a fact of life when it comes to "web 2.0" (hate that stupid term) but glad at least the point was made :)

Will be doing these slowly...

JQuery, acordion: functional with screenreader, but mildly annoying. The little sections fold in and out as required, but there's a weird transitional moment in a forms mode that has to be escaped between each change.

I can't seem to view any of the Dojo tests. I get links that say "javascript:/" and when I pick one, nothing seems to happen.

I pointed jade to these files last night, apparently when we moved our on-site demos to a new "tool" some a11y aspects were overlooked in the projects website. Here is some direct HTML based tests that illustrate the widgets in a normal page:

http://archive.dojotoolkit.org/nightly/dojotoolkit/dijit/tests/

the tests all begin with test_.html for the most part... some have multiple files for Programatic instantiation tests or more complex use cases.

For example the Accordion test: http://archive.dojotoolkit.org/nightly/dojotoolkit/dijit/tests/layout/test_AccordionContainer.html

Hope that clears things up for everyone a little bit.

(I have brought the a11y problem with the reference guide up on our dev mailing list as well so hopefully we resolve that soon ;))

Yup, those work.

Don't have time for this right now but I'll leave this post's page open and test when I have a moment. Thanks for all the great Wiki set-up for this!!

Cheers,
r

So, did a couple in the jquery set and I can't figure out how to edit the wiki, so I suppose I'll drop the results in here?

Testing wise, right now, I'm using firefox on a windows machine, am a visual user, and am currently on a setup mousing with my non-dominant hand and use a combo of mouse and keyboard to navigate with a preference for keyboard navigable.

1.1 Accordion: I can get it all to work, however, for me everything but collapsible is a pest as it adds to the amount of scrolling around I need to do to get things done and make my life harder. This issue is especially true if there is long text in the sections.

1.2 Auto complete: This was useful and the ability to scroll through and select from the menu with the keyboard was useful.

1.3 Buttons: These worked, though, as far as I could tell I had to use the mouse to navigate between buttons. When possible I prefer to be able to move between the buttons via the arrow keys.

The toolbar section felt a little confusing, especially the no repeat, once and all section.

Accessibility testing needed!

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Wet blanket

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Thank you!

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soothed

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