Accessibility?

[Sid]

Spamgourmet is great! Well done chaps.

But....(there's always a but, isn't there)...

It doesn't seem to be the most accessible website in the world.

I help a blind PC user in my spare time, and recommended Spamgourmet to them. It has saved their bacon, in that several Spamgourmet mail addresses are receiving enough spam to have spammed their real address into oblivion - so Spamgourmet has done a great job.

This particular user uses JAWS (from Freedom Scientific) and IE on Win2K, and is completely unable to manage Spamgourmet, whereas navigating eBay, and booking online airline tickets is a breeze - so it's not a problem for them using the web generally.

There are accessibility standards, and software for checking if your site is accessible - but I guess so far you haven't had enough of an itch to scratch with regards to improving Spamgourmet in this way. Please regard this as the first minute speck of itching powder.

I don't think it is a small job - I have no experience in putting together websites - but even I know enough to not expect things to be done overnight. How about by next week? :D

Joking apart, could you guys take this request into account hen coding improvements? It would be much appreciated, and I'm very sorry for not being competant enough to volunteer to do the work myself.

Regards,

Sid

[SysKoll]

This seems a reasonable request, but unfortunately, I haven't a clue about what needs to be done to make sg accessible to blind users. Could you provide some pointers? Heck, you can always view our HTML, so feel free to dig into it and tell us what's wrong with it.

[crazycomputers]

This is a feature of CSS2, and should require a minimal set of changes to the HTML sources, and a few changes to the stylesheet (if not a new stylesheet linked in with a different meduim.)

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS-access#ACSS

[josh]

I had run the site past an auto-verification service at one point (don't remember which one) and made a few changes to tighten the associations between form fields and their labels. I remember *thinking* it was good at one point, but I haven't thought about it for awhile. I'll look into it.

[Sid]

Thanks for taking an interest guys.

You might get some pointers from ths (old) article from 2001:

http://www.uwnyc.org/technews/v5_n5_a3.html

'Bobby' has now been replaced by another tool, but the ideas still hold.

A quick'n'dirty test is to not use your mouse - see if you can navigate and successfully use the Spamgourmet site using the keyboard alone - make sure the fields are tagged (so the voice browser ennunciates which field you've just moved into). Normally, the blind person I support uses 'tab' to move serially between fields (so it helps if the most used fields come early in the page), and hitting 'Return' is the same as pressing the 'OK' button, or you can tab to the OK button and press spacebar (which is also used to set/reset radio buttons). Esc is usally equivalent to hitting 'Cancel'. Obviously the button labels might be different - I guess the page writer gets to choose what 'Return', 'Tab', 'Spacebar' and 'Esc' actually do.

How the HTML and/or CSS is set up to do this (especially when using frames) is a mystery to me - sorry.

Some blind/partially sighted people use Lynx, coupled with a braille display, so checking that the site works well in Lynx can also help.

Anyway, I really don't expect things to change overnight, I do recognise this is a lot of work. It is also possible that the fact that not completely up-to-date versions of the OS and JAWS software are being used could be contributing to the problem. The person I support is due to get a new PC (running XP, with up-to-date JAWS) in a couple of months, so if SPamgourmet passes Bobby/W3C/Whatever validator with no problems, it could a problem at the user end.

I did try validating the front page of Spamgourmet with the validator now at the web-location referenced in the article - it threw up quite a few suggestions - but Im not competant to say whether they were actual problems or just noise generated by someone wanting to sell a 'validator product'.

Thanks again,

Sid