Experiences at Lostboys

June 1, 2006 8:07 PM

Lately I've been sent to Lostboys to assist a team of programmers in setting up a Cocoon website for a big house corporation. It's quite entertaining to have some students under your wing and throw them in the deep :)

Schijndel Website is "Drempels Weg"

April 12, 2006 10:21 AM

The Municipality Schijndel website has been declared "Drempels Weg", which means something like "Remove All Limits". Adhering to this standard allows e.g. blind people to surf the website in an accessible way. Ofcourse an important issue for a political organization.

So how can this be achieved? First, take a cup of coffee. Think about how much torture you can stand before you break into tears. Then if you think you're up to it, go to the Drempelsweg website (sorry, this is in Dutch!). Basically it comes down to making your website XHTML (Transitional) compliant, and tagging HTML elements with enough information (titles / alt tags / caption / summaries), so e.g. a browser for blind people can function properly. Most of the text on the website is generated from Hippo CMS, more particularly the HTMLAreas in the Editor. This should be easy for the website developer (me), since this should move the responsibility for adding meta information to html elements to the CMS user. Alas! CMS users are no robots. They can be lazy. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to force CMS users to add accessibility information to html elements inside the htmlarea (might be an improvement?). So that means we need some backup mechanism in the frontend. This comes down to providing downloads like names like "election results.pdf" with ALT texts like "Link to election results.pdf". Does this really help the blind man, I wonder? :).