My Little Black Book

Derek Featherstone
Real world Accessibility for Ajax and Web Apps
Sites : www.boxofchocolates.ca www.furtherahead.com

Right so i got caught out by the title like the typical buzzword try-er-outer. So first thing i read going through the workshops, was …. AJAX. So wow that’s like so now and everyone is doing it so the more AJAX the better right?

Upon closer inspection the workshop was more around the _accessibility_ part. And the first 10 min I thought whoops not quite what I intended to spend a day on, but i was captivated after the intro.

Quick key points
1. Forms
- Watch out for Visual labeling, use element
- “em” inside the “label” and position with CSS
- Replace “em” with a “strong” if its an error.
- Plan error/advisory information carefully (keep in flow or shift focus to it if not in flow)
- Dual purpose interfaces can cause issues.

2. Linear Flow
- feedback on an action should be where your focus is going
- have elements linear in HTML and position with CSS for visual organisation

3. Proximity
- when injecting content with ajax place do so in context.
- avoid injecting content at the end of the document if possible
- best yet avoid ajax if it can be hidden with CSS and revealed

4. Backup plan
- have a fall back option, multiple ways of achieving same goal
- use headings for “rescue point” if user gets lost in document

5. Visual Design vs Structure
- check that your visual design and un-styled document is telling the same story
- turn your CSS off see if site still makes sense
- build linear flow into your wire frames

6. Development Testing
- Test for accessibility from the start.
Design Stage: Color contrasts, general layout
Functional Testing: must work with keyboard
Demo Testing: all alt must be accurate, screen reader emulators, turn off css
Final Test: real people varied needs.
- test success error AND corrective paths
- check for alt tags and that they make sence.

A Tools and Links
- Screen readers Shark and Dragon Natural speaking
- HTML Tidy in Firefox is a good start
- Fangs Firefox plug-in screen reader emulator
- Juicy Studio Firefox plug-in for Luminosity Colour Contrast Ratio Analyser
- www.simplyaccessible.org for some examples
- WCAG the accessibility bible

Soo once again to make some sence of all the random jucy tidbits of knowledge, its definitely something i will be promoting from now on.

At a basic level it costs nothing. Its up to the UX designer and Developers to just take a bit more care in element placement and thinking about the project not just from you users perspective but also the less able users. As a by product this will produce a much higher quality product and the HTML is bound to be more semantic and efficient.

A quote from Derek that summed it up quite well :

Its about whats under the covers

Presenter M. Jackson Wilkinson
Twitter @wafro
Site: www.jounce.net
Developer(Python), Project manager, Agile Man

So i went into this presentation having seen a couple of agile projects in practice, and not quite sure what it was all about i did a couple of googles some time ago. When this opportunity came around i thought it would be rude not too.

Jackson was a great presenter and covered a wide range of topics from various peoples perspectives in the project team. I will not try and repeat it all as i would be here forever and its a bluebird day in welly so i’ll keep it short.

- Collaboration is imperative
- Embrace change
- Choose the team very carefully
- Everybody on the project team must “buy-in” to the goal
- Attention to the technical detail not just a quick hack as more time is spent on the development rather than the process.
- Release _working_ software often to the client to show progress. Not every cycle has a release

We brushed over the how the process works :

1. Cycle Zero
- Research
- Product Design
- Development Prep get ready to start coding
- Moodboards(very cool) for quick look & feel concepts
- Very importantly Defining Done

2. Cycle Planning
- Develop User stories eg. User can search for a photo.
- Test planning – asumption, success criteria, out of scope bits
- Use and index card to capture information gathered so far.
- Estimate is placed on each card and determined which cycle its targeted for.
- Use 1.2.4.8.16.32.64 for giving each storie points.
- Find your teams balance on how many storie points you can complete in a cycle
- Keep team rolling with backlog of the easy 1.2.4 tasks

3. Collaborative UX/UI
- Get business and designers to build mock ups together
- Quick and on paper gives you LOFI wireframes
- You can do more detailed wire frames but risk quibbling over detail
- Mock ups avoids confusion and developers love them

4. Daily Progress
- Focus on YTB, yesterday, today, blocks
- Use time keep it short and standing
- Just Google “scrum” it’s all there i promise
- there are all sorts of rules but use what works.

5. Pairing
- Thinker and Checker and the Does/Executor
- Development – Beter code less bugs
- Wireframes – review asumptions and help brainstorm

6. Test Driven Development
- Is a must
- Every function must have a test
- Selinium and Windmill for frontend test automation

7. Continuous Integration
- Automate Release cycle (cruzecontrol or hudson?)
- Frequent Release cycle (dayly, hourly)
- Check out, Build, Run Test, Notify if errored, Deploy(in Test)

8. Retrospective
- just before start of next cycle
- where are we at now
- reflect on previous cycle
- review story points completion
- review pairing arrangements

Appendix – Artifacts
- This one is still baffeling me as the whole point of agile is to just get into it, and only document what will be reused. But this means that some desision points may be lost because of lack of documentation.
- The code should be self commenting plus enough comments to make the rest understandable, frequent refactoring and good comments should improve this further
- Project wikis was also suggested.
- I do like documentation, so im unconvinced on this point of limited documentation

An interesting new term that was topic for a bit of discussion as it wasn’t on Google yet was “Layered Progress”
It is when you do development for your whole site in high level wire frames in the first pass. Next stage as they become available replace high level wire frames with more detailed ones, and as the final functional pages are available replace them again.
Implementation of this is up to you, if you hunt hard enough something like this may be found somewhere.

Another new one, for me at least, was “Coding Dirty”
It is when you developer builds the functionality and designer does the design afterward. This is fraught with danger as if your html/css is not marked up well it will produce a sub optimal result. Some people in the group has had success with this order.

Soo final thoughts. I’m not totally sold yet, there are some facets to it that i like but i will chew on the methodology a bit longer.

To give it appropriate visibility in an organisation you will need to try it on a small not critical but highly visible project to get the hang of it and get buy-in based on its success.

Now for some rest before day three AJAX and Accessibility shenanigans.

After a mad dash from the airport we made it just in time for the first session on the day. We did luck out on the good seats. But not even the neck wrenching all day long could take away from the sessions content.

I was amazed at the amount of ground that was covered by Russ Weakley. Fast paced and action packed till the last bell rang at 5pm.

Areas of particular interest to me, no i might hear you say du!, but my css and html skills have been hacked togeter like a IE 5 stylesheet.

• I’m slowly getting my head around Inline, Block and Terminal Block elements. I’ll have to go check out that last one again.
• Selectors are your friend, esp descendant selectors save you from needing to assign classes unnecessarily
• Try and use your site without a mouse, for basic accessibility testing
• Check out http://maxdesign.com.au for some css goodness and examples
• display:inline = inflow, display:block = out of flow
• CSS Sprites, have all your icons in one gif file to save round trips to the server. Use ample white space(100px) to avoid strange effects when font size gets increased.
• User more of “em” unit to make site more fluid when font size in the browser gets changed.
• Russ finally got me to make sense of “li” elements for navigation and how easy they are to work with.
• Also see “Sliding Door” for nice and neat little tabs with rounded corners. a and span elements are your friends here.
• Tables in forms are _bad_ for accessablility
• Build for standard compliant browser ALWAYS!!!, you can add IE specific hacks in at IE only style sheet.
• When doing a printable stylesheet see “media” attribute of the link element.

So at the end of a long day im calling it a wrap. The sooner i go to bed the sooner i can go and have a coffee at Delux

Double Margin Float bug is quite bizarre – Russ(Sounding like the Steve Irwin of CSS)