CivicActions

CivicActions endeavors that our websites be usable. Usable implies accessible, since a user with special needs can not use an inaccessible site. In this article I discuss techniques that every web developer, themer and front-end html coder should have in their toolkit. These are the low-hanging fruit, the simple and inexpensive techniques, that make a big difference for internet users with restricted access, from user with low bandwidth internet connections, to users with poor eyesight. We're not just talking about the Googlebot and spiders here.

What is accessiblity?

Google search provides many definitions of accessibility. Perhaps the best and most complete for the context of web development is from McGill University's website. Emphasis is mine:

accessibility: the ability to view web pages on different browsers and multiple platforms; especially concerns individuals with disabilities — that they have access to and be able to use information and data in a manner comparable to individuals without disabilities…

UPDATE: Buddhika Amila Sampath created the Light Fantastic theme, not Joshua Brauer. Joshua is the maintainer.

I recently searched on Themebot for a great contributed Drupal flexible-width theme for DrupalSouth.net.nz and found Light Fantastic. Joshua Brauer maintains the awesome Light Fantastic theme, which was created by Buddhika Amila Sampath as part of the Google Summer of Code 2007.

Screenshot of Light Fantastic on the DrupalSouth website:

See a larger image.

Google has announced their web browser Chrome. Many are excited while others remain skeptical. Currently I'm both; but a recent discovery has swayed me towards skeptical. Here's why.

IE6 Death March has led the way in the movement to stop support for IE6. Help your web developers help you to save money, conserve their sanity, build better websites and make the internet a better place. With so many other great browsers available, IE6 is just not worth the effort anymore.

If you think you really need to support IE6, I have two things to say to you;

With applications moving to the web, the desktop web browser is becoming more and more the center of users' attention. Consider for a moment what percentage of time you spend in Firefox or other web browsers compared to other programs or applications that run in your desktop – or use RescueTime (Yet Another Web App) to find out precisely!

This article describes briefly what Virtual Machines are, why they are useful, and compares some VM software for Mac OS X:

As web developers, it is often our responsibility to ensure that the websites we build are accessible by users of any common web browser and operating system. Since some browsers are only available on a limited selection of OSes, or behave differently on different OSes, it is impossible to be able to test a website on all browsers with one operating system; In order to test websites frequently, we need to have ready access to a variety of operating systems. Many folk use a secondary machine to run secondary OSes on, or dual-boot their primary computer. However having a mostly-redundant computer sitting by can be expensive, and dual-booting is time-consuming to switch OSes and does not allow you to access tools in your primary OS while testing in the secondary OS.

A short, quick and easy tip for views theming and customization.

To customize the text or the destination path/url of a 'view more' link in Views. Add this to template.php in your phptemplate theme and add cases.

To rebuild the menu in Drupal 6 you have to go to admin/build/modules.

In drupal 5 the menu is cached in the cache_menu table, so it is easy to invoke a menu-rebuild by emptying the table with a simple mysql command like TRUNCATE cache_menu;. (I have a handy script that empties all tables starting with cache_).

The Usability Testing Suite is in Beta! Google Summer of Code student Jimmy "boombatower" Berry has been coding hard and fast all this great usability testing tool.

The Usability Testing Suite is intended to be used for remote 'guerilla' usability testing. Currently it allows a usability test designer/engineer to create a study with a bunch of tasks, and invite participants to attempt the task, whilst remotely capturing data about the pages / urls the participant visited, the forms they submitted, what data was entered, and allows the participant to log typed live feedback as they go. More data capturers are planned (outside the scope of SoC) that will make this tool a really valuable asset to the Drupal Usability community.

Drupalcon Boston sessions were all recorded on video and have been made available on archive.org, thanks to numerous drupal community members and other Drupal resources.

(This is quite out of date now, but better late than never.)

Here are the videos from my talk on Scalable Theming: Theming for 100s of node types, CCK fields, and views: