justaddwater.dk » Accessibility

Internal Apps In Firefox

Jesper Rønn-Jensen — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:28:46 +0000

This post is probably highly irrelevant unless you work at Capgemini and want to use the internal nordic applications in Firefox.

Read on if you want to access systems like CTR (time reporting), Event calendar, Skills database, PDR, Project forms or similar applications in Firefox.

Problem is that the systems are not accessible at all if you’re not logged in. The reason is some extremely malformed HTML. Here is the entire content of the HTML page sent out:

CTR System

Several problems here: Content outside of HTML element. No body element. No end HTML tag. And the most critical that triggers this particular problem: The form element and the SCRIPT element are outside the body.

IE has an interpretation of this illegal structure: It creates a body element and fills in the SCRIPT and FORM tag into them.

Firefox guesses differently. It moves the FORM element to the body as well, but the SCRIPT element is put in the HEAD section. The consequence is that the form submit happens before the FORM element is rendered. And it gives a JavaScript error that the form is not found.

I wrote a Greasemonkey script that essentially posts the form again (and Greasemonkey is not triggered until DOM is loaded).

Install greasemonkey script:

capinternal_systems_login_nordic_apps.user.js (version 1.0 created 2009-09-23)

If you want to improve on it or add more for more internal systems, feel free to fork this gist on Github http://gist.github.com/191896

Sharepoint 2007, Accessibility, and Impossible UI Customization

Jesper Rønn-Jensen — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:51:53 +0000

Emil Stenström’s recent “Sharepoint 2007 from an interface developer’s view” is definitely worth reading if you care about webstandards, accessibility and decent frontend code in general.
Here are some of the quotes that really stand out in an excellent article that i really recommend you read before picking your web development platform.

One major problem is that you still need javascript enabled for many of the accessibility features. Enabling “Accessibility mode”, among other things, makes dropdown menus appear as new windows (popups) instead of dynamically writing HTML to the page. And this is after they “fixed” it.

Except from core.js, the javascript is spread out all over the place. As usual in many CMS:es, javascript is not treated as a real programming language, so there’s no structuring whatsoever. Sometimes it’s script tags, sometimes inline, sometimes external mini files, and most often automatically generated code. It’s a real mess, and is a big reason for the HTML size being so large. Many of the scripts do not work in browsers other than IE, which means you really need IE to properly use the admin interface.

The problem is that the system is built so that all of those “out of the box” features are hard to customize. Things like changing how the wiki renders, is really hard. Often it’s easier to rebuild that feature from scratch, than customizing what Sharepoint ships.

Keep an eye out for Emil, as he promises more posts as the project moves on. It’s good that people like him write about the ups and downs of development frameworks. And also valuable to share the possible workaround and best solutions — even when it is formulated like here:

Sharepoint 2007, is beyond repair when it comes to interface customization, and you should do everything in your power to avoid working with it. If I can give one interface developer the arguments to convince a customer to pick another system, this article was worth it.

Emil Stenström: Sharepoint 2007 from an interface developer’s view
Justaddwater: Sharepoint Meets Web Standards (June 2007)

Technorati Tags: standards, web standards, webstandards, sharepoint, sharepoint 2007, MOSS, 2007, microsoft, cameron moll, xhtml, css, w3c

Blue Beanie Day – A day for Web Standards and Accessibility

Thomas Watson Steen — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 12:47:46 +0000

I just got an event invitation on Facebook asking me to join “Blue Beanie Day“. Two questions quickly popped into my head:

What is a Blue Beanie?
Where do I get one?

If you are into web standards and accessibility you have already seen a blue beanie on the cover of Jeffery Zeldman’s great book “Designing With Web Standards“. A must-have for any web developer – both amateurs and professionals. You can see the cover here to the right.

The point of the event is to, on the 26th of November, wear a blue beanie when you go to work, to school, ride the subway, walk your dog at the local park, anywhere… This is your way of saying: Web Standards matter! Accessibility matter! This is your chance to raise awareness on this sometimes forgotten subject of web development.

Join now!

And add a picture of yourself on Flickr afterwards.

Technorati Tags: Blue Beanie Day, Jeffery Zeldman, DWWS, Designing With Web Standards, Web Standards, Accessibility, Facebook, Flickr, book, event

Google Power Tool for Webmasters

Thomas Watson Steen — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 14:02:56 +0000

If you run a blog or any other website for that matter, you might want to check out Google Webmaster Central – in particular their Google Webmaster Tool – if you haven’t already seen it.

Google Webmaster Tool is a great tool for webmasters who want to see and manage how Google crawls their site(s). If you have a Google ID you can add all the sites that you control to a dashboard. From here you can see intimate details for each site. After adding justaddwater.dk I found that Google was encountering some HTTP errors when crawling our site. This of cause is very important since other users unfortunately also encounter these errors.

When diving into the errors I can see that some links to our site point at stuff that is not there. I unfortunately cant see where these links come from. They could be external or internal I guess, but I have to manually look at my site to see. Adding a “source” for the link would be very easy for Google and be a great benefit to the webmaster.

Besides web crawling problems, the tool also gives loads of other interesting information. I suggest you take a look your self, but to just summarize I quote Google:

Statistics

Top search queries
See which search queries most often returned pages from your site, and which of them were clicked.

Crawl stats
See your distribution info for your site, including the current PageRank for pages on your site.

Subscriber stats
If your site publishes feeds of its content, this page will display the number of users who have subscribed to these feeds using Google products such as iGoogle, Google Reader, or Orkut.

What Googlebot sees
See details about how the Googlebot sees your site.

Index stats
Learn how your site is indexed by Google, including which pages are indexed, and which other sites point to your site.

Links

Pages with external links
See which pages on your site have links pointing to them from other sites.

Sitelinks
See which links on your site have been identified as candidates for appearing directly in Google search results.

Pages with internal links
See which pages on your site have links pointing to them internally from elsewhere on your site.

Sitemaps
Add and manage your sitemaps (including code sitemaps).

Tools

Analyze robots.txt
See whether your robots.txt file blocks specific URLs as is, or with modifications you make. Test against various Google user-agents, too.

Enable enhanced image search
Enable Google’s enhanced search for images on your site, including advanced labeling techniques for images hosted by Google.

Manage site verification
See all verified owners of this site, and optionally reverify them.

Set crawl rate
See statistics about how often Google crawls your site, and optionally adjust that speed if desired.

Set preferred domain
Associate a preferred domain with this site, to always or never show the leading “www.” in Google’s search results.

Remove URLs
Remove content from the Google index, including expediting that removal.

Technorati Tags: Google Webmaster Tools, Google Webmaster Central, sitemap, sitemaps, tool, review, search engines, http errors, accessibility

Mobile User Experience:Trying Out Opera Mini

Jesper Rønn-Jensen — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 21:27:25 +0000

While being on vacation in beautiful Toscana, Italy, i’m trying out the Opera Mini browser on my Nokia 6233 cell phone. It is actually possible to use the blog administration software on the browser (log in, navigate, write posts, etc.)

But it sure is not easy! There are lots of issues in the interface that easily leads to catastrophic accidents: For instance, i just lost half an hour worth of typing because i accidentally hit the back button. Normally i get a warning (“Are you sure…”), but apparently that warning does not work on the Opera Mini browser. HTML is tedious: I could use some kind of snippet library with at least p + a tags, and how do i enter a line break? Furthermore, i can see only two lines of text (8-10 words) at any time in the text area where i write this text. Absolutely horrific for reviewing text and really really annoying that there is blank space on the screen for probably six more lines of text!

Opera, Nokia: please team up and fix these issues. I will gladly help if you need more info.

Technorati Tags: opera, opera mini, nokia, wordpress, usability, browser, mobile, user experience, uxp

Does Sony think their customers are morons?

Thomas Watson Steen — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 12:33:34 +0000

I’m not pirating music or films, and I will gladly pay huge sums of money to huge world-wide record companies and film studios. But if they insist on protecting their publications with DRM, I will in turn insist only to pay half the price at the shop counter in return for less accessible content.

It is no secret that DRM, or Digital Rights Management, have been used widely throughout the DVD and CD publishing world for some years now. DRM is not a technology in its own, but rather an umbrella-term used to cover the various technologies that exist, intended to prevent illegal copying of DVDs and CDs.

CD is short for “Compact Disc”, a standard originally developed by Sony and Philips between 1979 and 1982. DVD stands for “Digital Versatile Disc”, a standard developed by Toshiba (and others) in the early 1990s. But you don’t need a Sony or Philips CD player to play your latest music CD, nor do you need a special Toshiba DVD player to watch a DVD-movie. This is due to the interesting phenomenon known as a “standard”.

Sony, Philips and Toshiba made a great effort to get other hardware manufactures to create CD and DVD players that could play the new format. They also allowed CD and DVD manufactures to create and sell CDs and DVDs. This all helped the formats to be widely accepted into every household. So when you buy the new James Bond movie, Casino Royale, you expect that you can go home and watch it, using one of your various DVD players in your household – even if they aren’t manufactured by Sony, Philips or Toshiba.

How DRM is bad User Experience

The way many DRM technologies work is by deviating a little bit from the CD or DVD standard, making the disc non-compliant to that particular standard. This works due to the odd fact that many optical computer drives aren’t that tolerant for errors in the CD or DVD. Regular players like the one in your Hi-Fi system or below your TV-set usually are though. Since most illegal copying takes place on computers and since it is now harder to get the computer to read the original CD or DVD, this in turn results in a medium that is harder to copy – not impossible, but harder.

The problem with this tactic is that it is not bulletproof. Like I wrote above, many standalone CD and DVD players can play the corrupted medium – but not all! There are many, many cases where a perfectly good car-audio system, home stereo or top-of-the-line DVD player are not capable of playing DRM protected CDs or DVDs. Just as many cases exist where computer CD-ROM or DVD drives are capable of playing and copying these same DRM protected CDs and DVDs.

In the early days of DRM the manufactures still labeled the DRM protected mediums the same way as the real CDs and DVDs. They got the certified “Compact Disc” or “Digital Versatile Disc” logos printed on them. In many cases these logos where removed due to huge outrage from the public. Personally I couldn’t agree more. It was like selling cheese at the supermarket labeling it “Lo-fat, only 2%” when it actually contained 25% fat. Putting the Compact Disc logo on an optical disc that did not live up the the Compact Disc standards was not good business practice (is it even legal?).

Let’s forget the fact that most consumers don’t bother to check for these missing logos, nor that they are still called “CDs” and “DVDs”. The biggest issue by far is that they still expect you to pay the same amount of money for a product that is only half as good. A product that can only be played on half of your players, not to mention the fact that you are not allowed to take backup copies for your car etc. – even in countries where this is actually allowed with real CDs and DVDs.

Dear record label and Dear film studio, please be fair and either drop the prices or just drop DRM altogether!

This story was inspired by many years of irritation over DRM. Recently spawned by a story on Slashdot where new DVDs released by Sony are reported not to work on multiple DVD players. Sony responded that it’s up to the manufacturers to update their hardware.

Technorati Tags: DRM, piracy, Sony, Philips, Toshiba, CD, DVD, storage, music industry, film industry, movies, file sharing, accessibility, user experience, uxp, video, security

Bad Usability Calendar 2007 in Danish

Jesper Rønn-Jensen — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 09:48:43 +0000

Thomas Baekdal and I have translated and are now publishing Bad Usability Calendar 2007 in Danish.

I can highly recommend using this calendar in projects as wallpaper. But good luck on using it for actual planning.

This year’s version contains advice regarding AJAX, overwhelming use of graphics, advertising, and much more.

Download Bad Usability Calendar 2007

English (560KB PDF)
Norwegian (1.2 MB PDF)
Danish (3.3 MB PDF)

Thomas Baekdal: Bad Usability Calendar – in Danish
Netlife Research: Bad Usability Calendar 2007 is here!
Justadddwater.dk: Bad Usability Calendar 2007 Finally Ready
Justaddwater.dk: Bad Usability Calendar (2006)

Technorati Tags: usability, accessibility, calendar, anti-usability, user experience, ux, uxp, humor, ajax

Bad Usability Calendar 2007 Finally Ready

Jesper Rønn-Jensen — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 08:57:31 +0000

I’ve been waiting for this with excitement: Eidar and the rest of NetLife Research in Norway have finally released the 2007 version of Bad Usability Calendar.

Direct download: Bad Usability Calendar 2007 (1.2 MB PDF)

Very nice to see that the calendar actually is released under a Creative Commons license, so you can translate it into you native language as long as you keep the reference to NetLife Research.

Technorati Tags: usability, accessibility, calendar, anti-usability, user experience, ux, uxp, humor

Google Release of Audio Alternative to CAPTCHA

Jesper Rønn-Jensen — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 20:47:20 +0000

Google updated their CAPTCHA logic to provide an audio alternative for visual impaired users — or also users that have a hard time reading the twisted letters.

Without even mentioning the online petition where almost 5,000 people protested against the original format where only an image was available. From the Google blog – Audio captchas when visual images are unusable:

You can easily spot the availability of audio captchas by the presence of the well-recognized “wheelchair” icon for accessibility — the image is tagged with appropriate alt text to help blind users. Incidentally you don’t have to be visually impaired to use the audio captcha; if you are in a situation where you find it hard to view the visual captcha — either because you’re at a non-graphical display, or because the specific visual challenge we offered you turned out to be unusable in a given situation, feel free to give the audio captcha a try. We’ve worked hard to ensure that the audio captchas work on different hardware/software combinations, and you do not need any special hardware (or software) other than a sound card to be able to use them.

Interesting that they changed the meaning of the wheelchair icon. Back in January when I wrote about Google being inaccessible to blind people, the wheelchair just symbolized a popup version of the same image.

Original Google CAPTCHA as described in Captcha usability revisited: Google inaccessible to blind people

More info:

Google blog: Audio captchas when visual images are unusable
Justaddwater.dk: Captcha usability revisited: Google inaccessible to blind people
Justaddwater.dk: CAPTCHA usability: Humane alternative to CAPTCHA
Petition online: Google Word Verification Accessibility

Technorati Tags: accessibility, google, captcha, image, audio, alternative

Bad Usability Calendar 2007 open for proposals

Jesper Rønn-Jensen — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 08:37:38 +0000

Our Norwegian friends at Netlife Research have opened for suggestions to next years Bad Usability Calendar. I already used the 2006 calendar with great impact in my professional engagements, and I’m really looking forward to next year’s version.

To make a calendar for 2007 that has the same level of unusual unusefulness, we would like your feedback.

Give us your best examples of bad usability!

The best idea will get an honourable mention, as well as a numbered limited edition of the 2007 Bad Usability Calendar. All suggestions that make the final cut will get a prize.

If you need inspiration, check out the Bad Usability Calendars for 2005(jpg), and 2006 (pdf). Thank you in advance for all your help.

Add your suggestions at their blog IAllEnkelhet.no (which means something like “in all it’s simplicity”).

For inspiration, I really enjoy the suggestion from Christian Watson (smileycat):

Read more at Netlife Research: Suggestions for 2007 calendar

Technorati Tags: usability, accessibility, calendar, anti-usability, user experience, ux, uxp, humor