On Tue, Jun 09, 2015 at 06:15:47AM -0400, Chris Hofstader wrote:
cdh: The last “repository” I actually used in a serious manner was cvs (and its DOS knock-off called PVCS)
I looked at a few of the repos and they are indeed in CVS. Ick.
And actually I think I would have to command-line these as clicking
on any "download" links takes me to a directory, which reminded me
of my SVN days (we only clicked links on a web page to get the URL
we'd use in the terminal).
My findings so far (I will copy it to some folder in Dropbox I
think, so people can read it and add to it etc):
Starting from the top of the main page source code, some of these
aren't a11y-related at all.
1. Remove the silly XML encoding bit. Not only are they not sending
this page out as XML or XHTML, but if they did, the non-well-formedness
of the code would prevent the page from rendering anyway.
1.a Update the Tranny doctype with a modern one.
1.b Don't bother setting the character set in the language, lest some
browser/AT combo pukes on it (leave it at lang="en") and move to a
server header and just-in-case a meta tag (first thing in the <head>,
even before the <title>).
1.c For best browser performance, set calls to stylesheets as early as
reasonable (so after charset meta and title), and move inline _javascript_s
to a single external script at the bottom of the page.
2. "Back to Savannah homepage" is good text for the first link, but one
thing to be careful of is when sighted and low/no-sighted people are
collaborating that everyone can call things by the same name. Here, this
is an image of the floating Gnu guru. Unless you moused over it or
focussed on it, a sightie would never know it was a link.
3. Skip links would be nice: while I'm also going to suggest the main
page part not be stuck at the end of the HTML source, I still want to
be able to jump to the relevant part without the Thousand Tabs of Death.
4. Similarly, I suggest roles: navigation and main at least. Maybe
search as well since that may be some people's first thing in a repo of
repos.
5. The text above the menu links ought to be headings ("Login status",
"This page"). Headings should not be part of the lists but above them.
6. Add (visually-hidden if needed) labels to search section: "search for"
+ text field + in + "category" + select.
7. Links have unhelpfully verbose title texts. Not only not available
to sighted non-mouse users, they're read out before link text in IE
with ZoomText and redundantly redundant.
8. Related to the above: there is an image of text about "support
freedom". The alt text of an image of text should be that text. Since
it's a link, we want short link text ("Join the Free Software
Foundation"). The link is currently wrapped around the whole image,
but we could have the image and link separate, and enhanced with
_javascript_ to make the whole image clickable if they want.
9. Visual tab order is confusing as it's first a left column, then a
right column, and finally the middle. Of course I suggest reordering
the code anyway. At the very least, any right columns ought to be
last in tab order.
10. "font-size: smaller" makes the text in the right column equivalent
to 10px (on systems where the default application font size is set to
approx 16px-- and there is no way for a developer to know a user's
default application font size). 10px is too damn small. Luckily for
us nowadays, ginormous font sizes are hipster-trendy, so we can easily
force the smallest texts to be at least 12px equivalent.
11. "boxtitle" classed items should be headings, eg "Latest news".
12. Inline styles like border="0", move to CSS.
13. Inline _javascript_s like div move to external
_javascript_ file (and only put onclicks on native clickables pls).
14. Fix invalid HTML (<p> may not have <ul> as children).
15. Make "Register New Project" a link instead of just bold text. Yes,
there's another link elsewhere, but the R of POUR means multiple
ways to get to what is probably an important page is a Good Thing.
16. "Read more" links and similar need more link context, not just
visual grouping.
17. Browser zoom squishes the middle/main part of the page, meaning
eventually it cannot fit words. Using a better source ordering and
CSS media queries means I'll be able to browser-zoom however much I
need to. Browsers are switching to "mobile" size styles if zooming
causes viewport widths to seem smaller.
18. I clicked "Full list" under "Hosted Projects" and got a table of
mostly empty cells.
19. I clicked "parsley" under "Latest non-Gnu projects". The project
name on the new page is in an h2. Suggest h1.
20. There are two links called "main" next to each other going to
/parsley/projects, suggest making the first one a heading.
21. "Export" link has a class "unavailable" on it, visually striking
it out. No non-visual way to show this link should be unavailable
for any reason. Suggest making it a disabled and non-focusable link.
22. Submenu on the Parsley page is unavailable to sighted keyboarders.
Either use JS or CSS to show the submenus.
23. Decorative icons should either be CSS backgrounds or have alt="".
24. Make "Unavailable" clear. Error pages should offer something for
the user, either at least a link back to the project in question
and/or for example a link to where one can join a project (as this
caused the error in question). Some of those links are dead/useless too
though. Not very user-friendly.
25. [+] display criteria clickables are unfocusable. All clickables must
be keyboard focusable, and when clicked they need to move focus to
wherever is most appropriate (if the clicked thing vanishes, move focus
to the next focusable or the other thing you can click to re-show stuff
again).
26. <a name="top"></a>, <center> and the such ought to be updated. Name
attributes on anchors have been uncool since HTML4 Strict became a thing.
In the pages I visited, contrast seems sufficient.
cheers,
_mallory
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