March 3rd 2005

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Members meeting on 03/03/2005

Our regular meeting - basically a monthly PHP PubCon - which is held on the first Thursday of every month.

Meet PHP users, professional developers and recruiters near you! Come to PHP London's March 2005 meeting to exchange ideas and talk about code, architecture, innovation, and open source in general. Anyone interested in PHP is welcome!

Where and when

The Cambridge from 7pm onwards.

Who will be there

Feel free to add your name if you're coming! Everyone who does so, links to their wiki profile page (copy the coding format of other names on the list - if it is displayed in red then you've not linked to a page that exists), and actually attends, will be entered in a random draw for a prize of £10 of drinks/food from the venue (started June 2009, still popular in summer 2010...).

Apologies for absence

If you wanted to come but can't/couldn't, feel free to explain yourself!

Agenda

7pm: Discussion / followup from RNIB visit

8pm: Spamproof Wiki project organisation

What about getting something organised on the Spamproof Wiki side of things? Nothing has been done since the Codefest (AFAICS). If I knew I could tackle a *certain* area and commit the results, that'd keep me happy.. I just need to find the courage to do this. It needs to be worked on continuously, instead of at just a monthly rate. --Jesse Walker

I agree. I washoping to write a few acceptance tests so as to protect the work that has been done. After that sign up to the devel mail list (on SourceForge) and just say what you want to do next. I have an idea how to organise the project, but I probably need to explain it face to face. I'd also like to get feedback on how to best organise SourceForge projects and I was going to post a SitePoint thread about this. --Marcus Baker

I'm coming along to the RNIB meeting as that sounds like quite a learning experience. I'm bringing my new laptop along with me, if you can call it that (spam like link removed) damn thing has the battery life of a spud clock, to RNIB so we can use that there if need be and later at the Cambridge. I'd like to show you some examples of OO patterns used in real world web applications. I run a small web hosting company. The real-time hosting control panel that I wrote was written in pure PHP even the communications between servers is all using PHP and sockets.

I'll have my FOSDEM presentation on SimpleTest with me (if anyone is interested ;-). But I'd very interested to see how you tackle the Codefest follow-up : I have such project for the French PHP UG (AFUP.org). --Perrick Penet

I have been meaning to give another presentation on SimpleTest as so far I have only done a mock objects one some time back. It would great if you could do this --Marcus Baker

1/2 hour is the time allocated to me for the FOSDEM presentation : I guess we could repeat that here ! --Perrick Penet


Follow-Ups

Still no better venue found so the next meeting at least will be at The Cambridge for sure.

Royal National Institute for the Blind visit

This is a demonstration of web accessibility by blind and partially sighted web users. The topics are use of a screen reader, screen magnifier and site reviews. Please make your site available on the web if you want a quick review rather than on physical media. All of the original demos are back after some hassling.

When

3rd March 2005 at 4pm (confirmed) although you can arive earlier and peruse the demonstrations. Squeezing everyone in will be a challenge so there may be some staggering of times on the day. For this reason it doesn't matter too much if you are a bit early or a bit late as this let's us spread the load.

Who will be there

Who will not be there

How to get there

The RNIB headquarters is at 105 Judd Street WC1H 9NE (on the corner with Hastings St) near Kings Cross.

Our host is now Lynn Holdsworth (020 7391 2366).


Report of the day's events

By Kevin Saunders

Around 12 PHP'ers all somehow managed to fit in the demonstration space and see Lynn Holdsworth, our RNIB web savvy demonstrator, demolish several well known sites like amazon.co.uk (which no one really liked anyway) and google.com (which nearly everyone liked a lot). Lynn was working on a windows machine running a screen reader (£600) and a braille keyboard assistant (£7000). £7k for a bit of blue plastic running down the bottom of a keyboard seemed pretty steep to me, obviously the price rises quite a bit when you have to cater for a non-mainstream market.

The reader scrolled through a web page and read back the text in the order that it actually appears in the web page. It initially tells you what the url of the site is and then tells you the number links in the page. You can scroll through the page headers (the "h" tags in the html) by using the keyboard arrow keys. Using the tab key allows you to scroll through the page links and form elements.

How it works

Our demonstrator seemed to use the screen reader like this:

  • Listen to how many links in the page
  • Arrow very quickly through the page titles (the "h" tags)
  • Tab through the links and forms
  • Try and find a page search
  • Let the reader vocalize the first few sentences of the text.

Amazon should die

Amazon was very quickly abandoned after the reader told us that it had 171 links in the page. It really brought home just how cluttered the home page was.

Amazon's other faults were:

  • No alt tags
  • No headers
  • Very long list of links down the left hand side
  • Confusing menu items

Google isn't as good as we thought it was

Surprisingly, google also took a bit of a bashing. Visually, google's home page looks uncluttered and easy to use. For a screen reader, it's a different story. The screen reader didn't make a distinction between the links at the bottom of the page and the search box in the middle of the page. It meant that Lynn had to tab through all the links and back to see what was on the page and then she went back to the search box. The search box in google receives focus the moment the page loads, something that is obvious visually but can't be seen by a screen reader. The results when they come back are also a little confusing for the screen reader as it makes no distinction between the paid ads at the top and down the right hand side and the real search results. Obvious when you think about it but having someone do it right in front of you makes it very clear.

The sites that we designed need a few er.. tweaks

A few of the 12 PHP'ers asked Lynn to check out their sites. Some embarrassed faces as she struggled to get through our content and design.

Things to think about

What was also clear was that standard 3 column layouts don't fare very well in screen readers. Unless that is, the designers also pay a lot of attention to headers and alt tags. What tends to happen for a blind person reading a 3 column layout is they get stuck on going down the left hand column as the screen reader reads down the columns and not across the rows. As the first column tends to be either menus or a dumping ground for ads and fluff, a lot of blind people would probably give up on a page before they got to the interesting part (usually the article in the middle column).

Design Tips and ideas

Lynn gave quite a few design ideas, I can't remember all of them but here are a few:

  • Visit the rnib's website for tips
  • Pay attention to your headers, just because you can make custom style classes to increase font size doesn't mean you should forget about your 'h's
  • Tables for layout are OK as long as you remember to put correct headers in the content
  • Use the "label" tags for form elements. If a screen reader hits a text box like the google search box, it can tell you that it is a text box but not what you should enter into it unless there is some description of it.
  • Alt tags are important, however, don't stick "*" in spacer images.
  • Keep alt text short. If you can't keep it short, at least make sure that first couple of words describe what it really means
  • Describe your links
  • Avoid fluff on your alt descriptions, having "This a link to my home page" just annoys a blind person who has to listen to 5 words before she knows what the link is all about
  • Avoid Flash. Although Flash 7 (created in Flash MX 2004) is supposed to be more accessible, Lynn said that the RNIB's effort to produce a test Flash site that could be read by blind people weren't very encouraging.
  • Avoid pages which have a javascript or meta tag refreshing the page every so often. The screen reader will just about get to an interesting part of the page before it loads and it has to start all over again from the beginning.

Lastly...

There is one big advantage that blind website users have over visual website users: the screen reader can read the page before it has finished loading. Some pages take a very long time to actually display, mostly because of the large number of graphics in the page. Screen readers don't need to wait for graphics to load, they work the moment there is enough text in the page to read. There were a couple of pages that we looked at where I was waiting for the page to load so I could understand what it was about and Lynn was already tabbing through the links and headers.

I had a very interesting day, thanks to Marcus for organising it and Lynn for showing us the web sites.

Lynn can be reached at lynn[dot]holdsworth[at]rnib[dot]org[dot]uk

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