How accessable is boards.ie for the blind?

Victor

How accessible is boards.ie for the blind and poorly sighted?

You know those silly little images with poor labels and text that is formatted wrong, does anyone have any problems?

Amz, any comments?

Amz

Well personally I find boards to be one of the best online bulletin boards as regards accessability.

However until I found the Cloud scheme it wasn't as comfortable on the eyes.

I find I tend to ignore a lot of the images/text that can't be read without squinting. If someone doesn't bother making it easy to read then I'm not going to waste my time on it.

I do have ZoomText installed on my computer but find that on boards with my browser settings adapted I don't have to use it, which is handy as Zoom Text unfortunately slows everything up and means I can only view pages in sections which can be frustrating. I also find however that Internet Explorer is best for magnifying ( View -> Text Size -> Largest) so tend to stick to that browser despite criticism.

*shrug*

Crash

thats something i'm gonna have to see actually (no pun intended)

gotta go run boards through the speech software i copied from my cousin and see how understandable it is. should get intriguing results

MarcusGarvey

The fact that the website and menu system is not cross-browser compatible probably tells you something about accessibility.

It also doesn't meet the Bobby Test as can be seen from the results here

I''m sure though that the admins would happily make it accessible if they had the time and expense. If someone were to make up a template that was accessible they might implement it.

DeVore

We would.

The difficulty, as you've pointed out, is that making it crossbrowser and still useable even for the average Joe is a trick in itself.

If someone can help use make it more useable without coming up with dumb ideas like "get rid of the navigation" or in fact if we can code something separate that makes life easier...well, we're all for making life easier and enabling as many people to be part of our community here, we just have to be sure we dont make it harder for everyone else by doing so.

I have absolutely NO idea what makes things hard or easy for PWD btw so suggestions welcome. Quick-Wins particularly welcome (and more likely to actually happen )

DeV.

Roller Toaster

Maybe a special skin for the hard of sight? It could cut down on all the unnessecary parts, images and colours. It would be a running project ie changing and adapting to the needs that the people who use it as to maximise it's benefits and although it's not a quick win as DeVore puts it it would probably the best thing in the long term. A forum could be set up for discussing it and designing it but I have no idea how many visually impared people use this site and while I'd be happy to help with this I also have no idea of what exactly would be required.

MarcusGarvey

A lot of the bobby stuff can be fixed by just editing some of the templates that boards uses to that tables have summaries and images have descriptions and so on.

DeVore

That stuff doesnt take long to do... the Minimalist skin might be a good place to start and users can turn off a lot of stuff themselves (like sigs and avatars).

DeV.

Roller Toaster

I think we're all thinking of something along the lines of the printable version of this page minus the signatures?

Victor

How about the barest of bare html navigitions on (an alternative) front page.

MarcusGarvey

Given that the textreaders generally start at the top of a page and read left to right you could have a small text link with a link to a text only sitemap of boards on the very top left of the entry page.

This would take up minimum screen space and it would be the first thing a screenreader would pick up.

You could actually put this link in a a filter then which generates pages specifically for people that follow that link.

David Weinberger also has a nice neat font size/colour/style changer on his blog. Kind of what Wired has as well.

billy the squid

The only problem I really have with boards is the drop down menus at the top of the page. when you have a tendency to loose the mouse on the screen these can get in the way alot. especially if they have sub menus for example the comunity menu has activeism which has submenus copntaining things like MIJAG and Rip off ireland for example

The large print program that I use (zoomtext level 2)does not have a problem reading the forums but if there is a large menu at the top it makes it harder to navigate.

another suggestion that i have is:

take a look at the link below it is a link to the list of topics in this forum

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?forumid=384

Instead of having to go through menus to get to this forum would it not be possible for the admins to create a page like http://www.boards.ie/accessibility which would redirect to this forum

The same could apply to the other forums


http://www.boards.ie/afterhours for afterhours
http://www.boards.ie/feedback for feedback/suggestions
http://www.boards.ie/everythingretro for everything retro

Roller Toaster

Yeah, they already have it set up for some boards like http://www.boards.ie/irelandoffline so hopefully it could be done for others.

Victor

Originally posted by fcddunne

Instead of having to go through menus to get to this forum would it not be possible for the admins to create a page like http://www.boards.ie/accessibility which would redirect to this forum

Done http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&postid=1141897#post1141897

MDR

cloud skin has much improved things for me anyway ... cheers for the suggestion AMZ ....

*wonders aloud if the cloud banner could be changed to a boards.ie banner*

tricky D

A few accesskeys in 1x1 pix images at the very start of page or not displayed to screen media thru css, to give the option to skip past nav stuff at the top or perhaps even stuff between posts.

And an accesskey to a basic nav page

Use of table captions, summaries and headers whose scope is to the relevant columns

The drop down menus aren't an issue imo if they degrade gracefully and/or have noscript stuff

Proper labels, option grouping and tabindexing for forms.

JustHalf

Originally posted by DeVore
We would.

The difficulty, as you've pointed out, is that making it crossbrowser and still useable even for the average Joe is a trick in itself.

If someone can help use make it more useable without coming up with dumb ideas like "get rid of the navigation" or in fact if we can code something separate that makes life easier...well, we're all for making life easier and enabling as many people to be part of our community here, we just have to be sure we dont make it harder for everyone else by doing so.

I have absolutely NO idea what makes things hard or easy for PWD btw so suggestions welcome. Quick-Wins particularly welcome (and more likely to actually happen )

You remember that critique I was supposed to write for you? Started actual pen-to-paper writing today, and it will be emailed to you by Monday afternoon (maybe sooner if I get a chance to work on it over the weekend). This is detailed in one of the sub-sections of the document.

Boards.ie makes screenreaders and text-only browsers cry.

Amz

AGM Saturday, November 22nd, Dublin
Sunday, 9 November 2003

The AGM is taking place in the Burlington Hotel, Upper Leeson St, Dublin 4 and we would hope to see another good attendance of parents, supporters and any other interested parties who can attend - all are welcome!

The meeting itself will start at 2.30pm and finish approx. 5.00pm although generally people would stay later to speak with other parents, guest speakers and others at the meeting.

This year our speakers include very experienced professionals in the area:

Joan Curran Child Psychologist with years of
experience with blind & visually
impaired children

Anita Tatlow Expert on Conductive Education

Bethan CollinsOccupational Therapist & Audioscope
Presenter

Refresehments will be served and if you are staying in the hotel please ask for the special feach AGM rate

Féach

Might be of help to anyone with a blind/visually impaired relative/child. If you could pass on the word.

I know from personal experience that this kind of support can be extremely beneficial to parents/carers of visually impaired people.

Moonbeam

The zoom option in opera is helpfuil too:)

davros

A good start to making a website accessible is to make it valid XHTML (preferably strict) and fully css-based. As a side-effect, everyone would benefit from the much smaller page sizes and thus faster download times that would result.