Comments on: More thoughts about a Deki switch

By: sheppy

sheppy — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:41:25 +0000

Marco — Yes, you can switch to a source level editor that lets you edit the raw XHTML of the content.

By: Marco Zehe

Marco Zehe — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:38:33 +0000

I forgot to ask: Does Deki Wiki allow turning off the WYSIWYG editor? WYSIWYG editors usually don’t play nicely with current screen reader versions. There are provisions in Firefox 3 to deal better with this, but these have to be supported by screen reader vendors. So before that happens, it should be possible to edit the wiki pages in code, too. Is that guaranteed?

By: Aaron Leventhal

Aaron Leventhal — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 17:29:32 +0000

Glad to see it works for Marco. He forgot to mention that he’s browsing with the JAWS screen reader. Sounds like the accessibility is fine other than the captcha.

By: Toby

Toby — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:31:22 +0000

How many wikis have been evaluated? Have you looked at TWiki?

By: Marco Zehe

Marco Zehe — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 06:58:22 +0000

I checked out the Wiki at the Deki Wiki homepage, and do not see any problems with those pages. Headings etc. are all marked-up properly, the table of contents can be found easily. So the one big problem that needs to be solved is the Captcha. I’d prefer a system that doesn’t require human interaction on the administrator’s part, since that will always delay login approvals and therefore hinder interaction and will make people who can’t use the regular captcha feel “at the mercy” of someone else.

By: Myk Melez

Myk Melez — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 23:04:55 +0000

Personally, I’m really looking forward to WYSIWYG editing, even if it has bugs. That one feature alone will make updating the site exponentially easier.

By: sheppy

sheppy — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:20:18 +0000

One thing about accessibility and markup: since Deki offers source-level editing, I think users will have improved accessibility in that regard.

By: Arthur

Arthur — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 20:22:01 +0000

Some of the blogs on planet.mozilla.org use perfectly accessible captchas. They’re mostly questions which are very easy to answer for a human but hard for a computer. That’s definitely the way to go.

By: sheppy

sheppy — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 18:57:59 +0000

Those are good points about accessibility and captchas. The problem is that the entire point to them is to prevent automated mechanisms of getting into the system.

However, assuming that they’re only used when signing up for an account (which I believe to be the case), we could probably come up with a special way to create accounts for people for whom captchas are a problem.

By: Greg K Nicholson

Greg K Nicholson — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 18:35:45 +0000

On accessibility, Captchas are intrinsically inaccessible on purpose. Using a visual Captcha with an audio Captcha as an alternative immediately excludes deafblind people (and doing so is illegal in some countries, including the UK). Eric Meyer's wp-Gatekeeper is an example of an accessible alternative. Using non-semantic mark-up is also at odds with accessibility: if semantics are only conveyed using visual convention (big, bold text is a heading) rather than explicitly described in the mark-up (stuff inside an h3 element is a heading), blind people and Googlebots miss most of the writer's intention, which makes it harder to convey meaning. Invalid mark-up isn't necessarily semantically void, but it tends to be (and ?why invalid structure use no reason good for).