Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] firefox, web accessability, and the programto make it all better

[Mark Rages <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Ellis, at least, has a text version:

http://mulibraries.missouri.edu/text.htm

Regards,
Mark
EMAIL:PROTECTED

On Thu, 2 Dec 2004 11:48:17 -0600, Jonathan King
<EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> OK, so with a few exceptions, I've got type-ahead-to-find working like
> a champ, my emacs editing keys work pretty well (still no cntrl-Y,
> though) and life is basically a blast since I don't have to take my
> hands away from the keyboard.
> 
> And, my word, Firefox is significantly faster than Safari at rendering
> most sites (which did not used to be true) and especially fast at
> rendering/downloading gmail.  So I should be incredibly happy.
> 
> Except when I'm not.  Grumble, grumble.
> 
> It turns out that several sites have text navbars that don't actually
> have text in them, using the oh-so-90s technique of a navbar gif and
> an image map.  This defeats type-ahead find in Firefox, pretty
> obviously, and is just a gratuitous accessability problem.  (You can't
> as easily navigate via the keyboard, and increasing the text size via
> cmd-+ doesn't make the navbar any more readable if you like or need
> big text.)
> 
> A classic example of the problem is:
> 
> http://mulibraries.missouri.edu/refservices/ellis/ellis.htm
> 
> ...which is a top 10 site for me and many others on campus I'm sure.
> If you look at the source, you see a completely gratuitous use of
> frames wrapping the gratuitous use of the navbar imagemap.
> 
> The more I think about this (30 seconds did the trick), the lamer it
> seems.  A quick google search for:
> 
> navbar site: missouri.edu
> 
> turned up 154 hits.  Looking at a few of them, I see the same old,
> same old pattern.  (And this is just the tip of the iceberg, in all
> likelihood; googling for navbar world-wide gives you more than 1
> million hits.)  So the question is: what should be done about this?
> 
> I have sent email to the person responsible at Ellis, and I'll find
> out what she says.  I'm guessing some good could even come of things
> in this case.  But, in general, does anybody know a nice and effective
> way to get people to change a less accessible site?
> 
> I think that the best way might be just to give them the code to
> change things.  Once you've gotten some tweaks made, you can generate
> even a semi-custom nav bars using CSS and html pretty much
> programatically.  You could then tell people, "Hear, just paste these
> lines in place of what  you have" (or do the surgery for them) and
> they could see that it worked, looked good, degraded more nicely, and
> was just the Right thing to do.
> 
> So does anybody know whether anybody has already started a campaign
> like this?  It really did just hit me this could have real legs these
> days.  The stupid gif navbar is just one of many related lamenesses
> that follows a consistent and predictable pattern.  And, indeed, once
> you have detected any of these "lameness patterns" you can use google
> to find 10,000 others just like it, so if you can fix one, you can
> probably fix most of the others...and notify the people in charge.
> 
> Well, enough of this safe the world talk; I gotta eat lunch. :-)
> 
> jking
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