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Themes: "AccessibleXOOPS"

Posted by: lenoirmindOn 2005/6/17 22:29:59 9796 reads

Hello fellow XOOPSers,

At FNB (Federation of Dutch Blind Labraries) we have been working on a methodology for building portals and applications that exhibit 'accessibility from scratch'. For our portal projects we prefer the XOOPS system. The European Accessible Information Network's portal is based on XOOPS and we've added functionalities to switch themes. nothing new of course, since this is a core feature. We're investing some time in implementing a theme that has accessibility features builtin as well. We call the combination of XOOPS and an accessible theme 'AccessibleXOOPS'. A demo can be seen @ http://www.euain.org

Personally I think that 'real' accesisbility start in the core of an information system. And for that reason I have great hopes for future releases of the XOOPS system. The foreseen features I've seen in the dev versions as well in the X4 roadmap are very inspiring directions.

At the ELPUB 2005, the 9th ICCC International Conference on Electronic Publishing, focusing on challenges for the digital content chain, conference we've presented some notions about accessible content management systems and took XOOPS as the reference system. You can read the abstract of the paper we've submitted here: ELPUB2005:FNB

Lot of work needs to be done of course and comments/help would be appreciated.

Tip: there will also be a presentation and publication of these initiatives at the Open Source Systems Conference

Regards,

LM

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user

Re: "AccessibleXOOPS"

Herko Published 06/17/2005 22:33 XOOPS is my life! Joined 02/04/2002 Comments 4238

Very nice work! If you can help us make the core more accessible (at least for XOOPS 2.4), that would be great

Herko

Re: "AccessibleXOOPS"

amayer Published 06/18/2005 12:35 Friend of XOOPS Joined 10/18/2003 Comments 82

The focus on accessibility is certainly welcome, especially if XOOPS is to be taken seriously and used professionally.

Sorry if I've missed the point, but what exactly is "nice" about this site? I can't find anything accessible about it.

http://www.euain.org certainly isn't accessible: The site doesn't layout properly without the stylesheet, there are no access keys and image alt tags, tables are used for positioning etc - to name just a few problems.

For a full accesiblity report on this site see here.

Andy

user

Re: "AccessibleXOOPS"

jdseymour Published 06/18/2005 12:48 Friend of XOOPS Joined 11/11/2004 Comments 3782

The dropdown list in the upper right hand corner selects the accessible feature of the page.

It seems to have 2 settings, Traditional Viewing Profile and WAI Viewing Profile.

Very interesting.

Re: "AccessibleXOOPS"

amayer Published 06/18/2005 13:06 Friend of XOOPS Joined 10/18/2003 Comments 82

Hey jdseymou. Thanks for pointing out the options! I didn't see them at first... duh

Anyway, that makes me wonder how well these kind of "viewing options" are seen by visually imparied people. Using CSS, there is no reason why a site can't be built that looks good and degrades well for accessiblity (without the need for selecting options).

We are trying to develop such an accessible XOOPS theme, but it's not all there yet. You can see it here:

http://www.sttoms.net

It doesn't use tables for layout, and views perfectly well without the stylesheet. But there are still accesiblity issues....

Andy

user

Re: "AccessibleXOOPS"

Herko Published 06/18/2005 15:03 XOOPS is my life! Joined 02/04/2002 Comments 4238

I would like to state the obvious again: I invite everyone working on making the XOOPS output acessible and validated by default, to help out to make XOOPS 2.4 better in this respect. XOOPS 2.2 is a start, but not there yet, and we definately need your help and experience with this

Herko

Re: "AccessibleXOOPS"

amayer Published 06/18/2005 16:53 Friend of XOOPS Joined 10/18/2003 Comments 82

Hi Herko,

What exactly did you have in mind when you say "help out"? I guess you mean more than just making themes/templates?

One thing you can do, is make sure that the core and core modules code do not contain any HTML, and that it's all handled by smarty templates in themes and templates.

I often see smarty variables that are set to contain HTML. For example, rather than the title on news stories containing the title of the article embeded in a tag, there should instead be two smarty vaiables (one for the title text, and one for the url address). That way the theme/template coder can completly control the HTML output.

Another example is smarty variables for bulleted lists in blocks often contain

code.

If you could make sure no HTML was present in PHP code, then that would be a huge step forward.

I would even be willing to develop the XHTML compliant template/theme sets to support this.

Hope that makes sense,

Andy

user

Re: "AccessibleXOOPS"

Herko Published 06/18/2005 18:33 XOOPS is my life! Joined 02/04/2002 Comments 4238

That is one step ye, but adding access keys, alt tags, title tags etc. is something that needs to be done by default as much as possible. Showing by example how to make accessible and validated themes and templates is what we should do, IMHO. Form buidling (using the xoopsform classes) is a tricky area, if I understand correctly.

What I am asking is a list of things we should change and adjust to make XOOPS accessible and validated. Not only 'possible', but actually so

Herko

user

Re: "AccessibleXOOPS"

lenoirmind Published 06/19/2005 9:35 Just popping in Joined 10/25/2004 Comments 27

Hello All,

I love the look of http://www.sttoms.net.

I agree on the points about CSS and I have to add that -to me- AccessibleXOOPS has several levels of abstraction.

First you have the formatting that acts as the direct interface to the content (and the modules) of your site. This is where the WAI1.0 guidelines come in. The smarty engine and XOOPS's theme engine are perfect for this.

A means of selecting an accessibility profile would be nice and I suppose it has to be in (that's why I've put that ghastling dropdownbox over there), but ideally the 'common' theme and an accessible theme merge into one. I see no reason why this shouldn't be possible. Except thorough knowledge about what you're doing

I think it would be very worthwhile if we could find a means to synchronise different accessible theme design initiatives. It may turn into implemented guidelines that can be useful for many tasks. If we could come up with practical *structural* implementations of WAI1 for a content management system, that would be grand...

Another level of AccXOOPS is the integration of production and management processes that are required to produce and distribute accessible media content. FNB is a library with a production unit for fi, music sheets, educational books, graphics etc etc. The traditional versions of these resources are transformed into accessible ones. For instance Music Sheets to Talking Music - fully automatic. IF we are able to link these processes into a portal system directly then you'd have an ideal couple.

Yet another level is the Human Computer Interaction research domain. Being able to associate production/consumption processes with chunks of knowledge from the HCI domain would lead more towards 'implementations' WAI2.0 guidelines... and again using the same framework: XOOPS.

Of course this is dreaming dreaming, but anyways... it is fun dreaming

Certainly would make our lives (as librarians developers, designers) a tad easier. It goes without saying that XOOPS is THE choice for the job.

Sorry if this message cluttered the thread a bit. But I think that if we are able to seperate the layers of processing that 'make up' accessibility, we would contribute greatly to the understanding of what accessibilty is.

Regards,

LM

user

Re: "AccessibleXOOPS"

lenoirmind Published 06/19/2005 9:40 Just popping in Joined 10/25/2004 Comments 27

Hi Andy

You totally right

EUAIN is an EC funded project, quite big, stressy, clunky and... at FNB we are more or less outstaffed. So I had to choose to dive into 'doing it all myself' or make sure that EUAIN uses XOOPS and provide at least SOME pointers to what we intend.

I tried to make the point that XOOPS can serve both markets (if I may name it like this); common content access and accessible content access.

Thanx for analysing the site - I hope I can find some time to make the euain theme itself accessible.

LM

user

Re: "AccessibleXOOPS"

lenoirmind Published 06/19/2005 9:48 Just popping in Joined 10/25/2004 Comments 27

Hi Andy, all,

Clear seperation of code and formatting is the key yes. It now only provides an overview of hox the code related to the content and where the formatting decisions are taken and such. It also provides clear points for developers to introduce content processing logic. Next to content publishing logic.

With content publishing I mean for instance any module that publishes content to any user, such as News, wfSection etc etc. With content processing I mean modules (or core features) that perhaps not directly publish content, but process it and pass it on to other modules (or core features). A sort of a filter that does things with content in a controlable way and which provides settings for each filter setting - preff in an accessible way.

A similar concept would be middleware, I think.

In our publications and projects @ FNB and elsewhere we frequently refer to Accessible Information Processing. Which is a term we invented to give the initiative and the thoughts a face

Regards,

LM

user

Re: "AccessibleXOOPS"

pmhoran Published 07/02/2005 13:01 Not too shy to talk Joined 02/21/2003 Comments 115

Very nice ... but ... personally I do not find it that Accessible yet.

I am disabled with vision & hearing limitations. I cannot comfortably use my speakers or headphones ... so I rely on being able to read.

Due to cognitive dysfunctions I also use Internet Explorer because it is the browser I understand. I have tried FireFox but because of my disability ... it confuses me.

My problem with your Accessible demo is ... with IE I cannot increase the font of the text on the page. The title increases a bit ... but thats it. So when I viewed your demo I had to try a number of different strengths of glasses until I found the pair that magnified it enough so I could actually read anything.

I have mentioned it here in another thread months ago. I wish everyone would stop using fixed sized fonts on their sites and start using percentages. Would sure make my life easier and I imagine many others as well.

JMHO
Peter

user

Re: "AccessibleXOOPS"

aptmusic Published 09/27/2005 13:22 Just popping in Joined 07/21/2005 Comments 10

Hi All

I'm looking round currently for an "accessible" template in XOOPS so that I can learn about adding in Access Keys, etc, for a site for the Charity which I work for. Having tried out numerous CMS options I've found that XOOPS is the best for our needs.

I've had a look at the http://www.sttoms.net site and Andy, I am VERY impressed with it and was wondering if it's at all possible to get a copy of the basic template you've used for the site so that I can take a look into how you've done things in hope to better understand a) the XOOPS template system and b) implementing the various Accessible features you have put in there.

Cheers
Andy

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