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SoylentNews is people

posted by NCommander on Tuesday February 18 2014, @12:03AM   Printer-friendly
from the holy-cow-1k-users dept.

Hey, just a heads up on our Day 1 status. I've made some tweaks to the moderation script to handle the surge of users we've gotten, so modpoints should start flowing more easily. I'm making a few more tweaks right now that should get this working as expected (I am going to have to purge out the point in system to reset the script though, so if you have modpoints right now, don't be surprised if they suddenly vanish into the ether.

We know there have been some issues with both registration and submitting stories. On the registration front, some of our emails have been marked as spam, so if you're not getting them, check spam filters. In addition, for the last half an hour, we had a problem with a human confirmation check breaking, which just got cleared. We'll keep you apprised of any updates to this. As for story submissions, this looks like an artifact of a human confirmation script that got re-enabled when we went live. It should be working properly now for logged in users, as well as AC, though I'll be keeping an eye on it. I hope to have a more verbose tech write-up of the site sometime tonight.

 
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Vanderhoth on Tuesday February 18 2014, @01:05AM

    by Vanderhoth (61) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @01:05AM (#1239)

    That's not an optimal solution for people with assitive technologies (screen reader). Tables can be a real pain in the ass to navigate, espically when you have to navigate the same table on every page load/refresh. That said, I don't disagree with you.

    --
    "Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Insightful=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 1) by NCommander on Tuesday February 18 2014, @02:26AM

    by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Tuesday February 18 2014, @02:26AM (#1297) Homepage Journal

    What's it currently doing on the main index which is actually working?

    --
    Still always moving
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Vanderhoth on Tuesday February 18 2014, @02:31PM

      by Vanderhoth (61) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @02:31PM (#1615)

      First of all this is going to be a long post. Second please don't take it as criticism, you guys are doing a great job, especially considering you're starting form code built in the late 90's.

      Unfortunately I can't really sum up 5 years of training, courses and on the job, and assistance from a huge teams of people from different organizations in one posting, but I hope I can give you an idea of what it takes to develop something accessible. If you're interested the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 [w3.org] is a good place to start reading.

      I'd also like to point out that AudioGuy is right, there's no one easy solution for laying out a page using CSS. Tables, or div's, would be the easiest way for a web dev to get things up and running easily. For the non-blind that works fine. If however you wanted to be inclusive, that method sucks for the blind, especially tables because of how they're parsed by screen readers. Tables are for spreadsheet data only where column and row headings are important.

      A good rule of thumb is if you turn CSS off the page should be readable (like a word document), if you're doing a lot of scrolling (past menus at the top of the page perhaps) your page is going to be annoying for a blind person to sit through. Ideally the "star" or "meat" of the page should be the first thing you see at the top with CSS turned off. It's not always possible, but when is anything ever ideal.

      If anyone's interested Firefox has an add-on called "Fangs". It's trivial to install and lets you right click on a page and select "view with fangs". It gives a pretty reasonable text representation of how content is read by a screen reader and includes the Headings List and Links List, which are two common ways I've seen blind people navigate through a page.

      Jaws is the screen reader the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) recommends to the visually impaired on a budget. I'm not using "visually impaired" as politically correct term, it includes people who are blind and people have low level vision. Jaws has a demo version that's good for something like 30 minutes after which it stops working, every restart give you another 30 minutes. It's not bad for development purposes, but it's windows only and the first time I installed it, it really Fucked up my display settings.

      I'm not visually impaired, but I have friends at the CNIB and have heard them speak at events demoing assertive technologies. Smartphones as an example have made significant improvements in their lives, GPS really helps them get around, accessible bus schedules, wireless lights, on-line bills (it's apparently quite the pain to get a bill in braille, buy you can get your phone to read it to you out of the box).

      The lights is kind of a funny story, The CNIB guy that spoke at an event said it really got on his nerves when people would come visit him and run around his apartment turning on the lights, because they couldn't see, then they'd leave and leave all the lights on. Apparently he had the lights on for over a month once before he got his power bill. Now he has some wireless LEDs that are on a timer to turn off, so if for some reason the lights are on, his phone will turn them off. He said before that most blind people would just take the light bulbs out of the sockets to keep their friends form mindlessly turning on the lights, they'd have to ask or note the light wasn't working.

      After Note: I have to stop here, it took me 2.5 hours, just skimming the page, to come up with the following and I have to get some work done.

      /* onto the content*/

      Navigating a page for the blind is different than it is for the non-blind.

      No way they'd sit through just a reading of the Soylent page, which might be read kind of like:

      "Page has twenty-one headings and one hundred forty-seven links SoylentNews colon SoylentNews is people dash Internet Explorer Heading level one Link SoylentNews List of five items bullet Link Graphic Security bullet Link Graphic Science bullet Link Graphic Code bullet Link Graphic Software bullet Link Graphic slash dev slash random List end Heading level two SoylentNews is people Heading level four Navigation List of ten items bullet Link About bullet Link FAQ bullet Link Journals bullet Link Messages bullet Link Topics bullet Link Authors bullet Link Older Stuff bullet Link Past Polls bullet Link Submit Story bullet Link Create Account slash Log In List end Heading level four SoylentNews You should update your organisation template and put some links here linking back to your site. Heading level four Link Launch News Welcome to Soylent News. As we're stil in alpha dash test, these articles cover much of what's going around in the site Necessary Reading colon List of four items bullet Link Welcome to SoylentNews! bullet Link Reworking Moderation Access bullet Link Massive Site Progress dash Status for two slash sixteen bullet Link Welcome to the World of Tomorrow... "

      I'm already annoyed and we haven't even gotten to the content for the page yet.

      "Link Graphic Security bullet Link Graphic Science" would be especially annoying. We read it as Link Graphic Security, but if a screen reader was sorting and reading by links "Link graphic Security Link graphic Science..." would be read as Link, Link, Link, Link, Link with no description about what the link is. I'd use CSS to hide link text and replace it with an image so it'd look like

      HTML

      <div id="science_link"><a href="...">Science</a></div>

      CSS

      div#science_link {
          width: (however big your image is)px;
          height: (however big your image is)px;
          background-image: url("URL_to_image");
          background-repeat: no-repeat;
      }
      div#science_link a{
          display: none;
      }

      Then it'd be read as "Link Science" and would also be read if the page was sorted by links, but to non-blind it'd be the image.

      The blind might try to skip around by headings, but most untrained web devs use headings as decoration rather than an index/table of contents.

      As an example with the Soylent site. We have
      H 1 SoylentNews
      H 2 SoylentNews is people
      H 4 Navigation
      H 4 SoylentNews
          .
          .
          .
      H 3 South Korean Banks Punished for ID Theft

      H4:Navigation and H4:SoylentNews are actually helpful, they're probably the two options I'm most likely to choose, but they sit at the H4 level, BELOW the actual content at the H3 level. Actually you don't even need H4:SoylentNews, because you have H2:SoylentNews right above H4:Naviation.

      So there's 10 items I have to sit through before I can get to the content, and if it was read as a table of contents it wouldn't make any sense. Imagine that being read as one of those annoying phone menus.

      "Welcome to SoylentNews, SoylentNews is people! Please chose one of the following options.
      press 1 for Navigation
      press 2 for SoylentNews
      press 3 for Launch News
      press 4 for Poll
      press 5 for Most Recent Journal Entries;
      press 6 for Login
      press 7 for Older Stuff
      press 8 for Quick Links
      press 9 for South Korean Banks Punished for ID Theft... You've selected South Korean Banks Punished for ID Theft.

      Welcome to SoylentNews, SoylentNews is people! Please chose one of the following options.
      press 1 for Navigation
      press 2 for SoylentNews
      press 3 for Log In
      press 4 for Related Links
      press 3 for South Korean Banks punished for ID Theft... You've selected South Korean Banks punished for ID Theft

      South Korean Banks Punished for ID Theft posted by Link Dopefish on Tuesday February eighteen at five colon...."

      It is a little different for the visually impaired. My friends at CNIB often have the reading speed on their screen readers turned up so fast I can't understand what it's saying, they can also tab through the headings. When the headings are arranged in a meaningful index they can have only H1's read to them or only H2's (where most relevant content should be)

      Soylent news is kind of all over the map in terms of Headings and the headings really don't have much relation to the content. Except for the story headings, which sit at the H3 level, which really isn't so bad. If I had the page read by heading level it'd be H1:SoylentNews H2:SoylentNews is people H3:Story heading, but at the speed my CNIB friends browse, they'd probably hear Heading level 1 SoylentNews Heading level 2 Soylen... I've already heard SoylentNews, skip to the next level two heading.

      It's very general and there's a lot missing here, but a nicer way to layout the page might be something like:

      <body>

      /* Quick Skip menu, hidden by CSS, allowing navigation to relevant information on the page. It's not in the headings so if the page is in Heading list mode it isn't read, but provides quick navigation to where the primary content and navigation elements are on the page. The default for screen readers is to read the page from top to bottom, you have to use quick keys to change sorting mode to heading or links, on every page, so it's convenient to have this quick skip menu. */

      <div id="skip">
      <ul>
      <li id="skip1"><a href="#cont">Skip to main content</a></li>
      <li id="skip2"><a href="#nav">Skip to secondary menu</a></li>

      /* you could also add stuff like the poll here, but try to keep it short and relevant otherwise you defeat the purpose of having a quick skip menu*/
              <li id="skip3"><a href="#poll">Skip to poll</a></li>
      </ul>
      </div>

      /* The content for the page should be noted somehow using an H1 tag, because H1 tags will be the first thing a blind person will listen to to get a high level overview of the pages content and find relevant information */

      <h1 id="cont">Daily News (or some other title that describes the following content is the meat of the page)</h1>

      /* Story titles should be h2 tags because they're the most important part of the page I'd want to be able to tab through the list, it might be nice to also link the titles to the summary page, but linking "comments(241)" is also ok because it's descriptive of what the link is for. "Read more..." not so much. Read more what? comments, read more of the summary, read more of the article? */

      <h2>South Korean Banks Punished for ID Theft</h2>
      <h2>Nanomotors Inside Living Cells For The First Time </h2>
      .
      .
      . /* And here we have it the navigation menu, which I think is what this whole comment is about. The reason the menu comes after the content is because to a blind person they don't want to read the damn thing at the top of every page. They know where they are, they want to read the content. don't make them sit through a phone menu every time a page loads or is refreshed. Also notice the use of the "nav" tag, assistive technologies and modern browsers take advantage of this so it's good practice to use it. */

      <nav role="navigation"><h2 id="wb-nav">Navigation menu</h2>
      <h3 class="top-section"><a href="/index-eng.php" title="Bedford Institute of Oceanography">SoylentNews</a></h3>
      <ul>
      <li><a href="...">About</a></li>
      <li><a href="...">FAQ</a></li>
      <li><a href="...">Journals</a></li>
      .
      .
      .
      </ul>
      .
      .
      .
      </body>

      • (Score: 1) by bspar on Tuesday February 18 2014, @03:12PM

        by bspar (973) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @03:12PM (#1641)

        That was great of you to take your time to go over all of that! I hope the admins can get around to reading your comment - I sure learned something this morning :)

        • (Score: 1) by Vanderhoth on Tuesday February 18 2014, @03:41PM

          by Vanderhoth (61) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @03:41PM (#1656)

          Thanks, I've been in on SoylentNews from the beginning. Mostly offering advice for if we decided, or decide, to turf SlashCode. I couldn't get it running because it uses an outdated version of perl and mod_perl for Apache. I'm not a perl guy.

          A site like this could be quite a nightmare, a lot of different people using a lot of different technologies with a lot of different browsers. Mobile, desktop, tablet, CSS on/off, JavaScript (glad they're staying away from JS for the moment), security, databases, backend language there's a lot to consider.

          --
          "Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
  • (Score: 2) by AudioGuy on Tuesday February 18 2014, @06:41AM

    by AudioGuy (24) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @06:41AM (#1446) Journal

    Why would a table cell be any different than a div for someone who is blind? I am not blind, but one way I judge this sort of thing is by how Lynx handles it, and I do not remember any signifcant problems with a simple 1 row 3 cell table that would be different than the same structure using divs.

    For me the bigger problem is the extreme amount of repeated stuff on most modern sites at the very top of the screen. You have to scroll forever to get to the main text.

    • (Score: 1) by Vanderhoth on Tuesday February 18 2014, @10:43AM

      by Vanderhoth (61) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @10:43AM (#1517)

      Tables are read by screen readers as "Table Col 1, row 1 [content], Col 1, row 2 [content], Col 2, row 1 [content], Col 2, row 2 [content], Col 3, row 1 [content], Col 3, row 2, [content]" it headers are set they're read as well. The advantage being you can have the Col row read back to you if you're lost in the table. Div tags aren't read by the screen reader. Short on time, gotta go.

      --
      "Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe