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What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay?

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Jorge Ferrer, modificado 15 Anos atrás.

What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay?

Liferay Legend Postagens: 2871 Data de Entrada: 31/08/06 Postagens Recentes
While the main challenges of creating accessible websites directly in HTML have been solved some time ago, using a content management system or a portal platform brings up a whole new set of challenges.

The core developers of Liferay are fully committed to making it a great platform to build websites and portals that can be used by as many people as possible. The first step is to recognize that we haven't done such a good job in the past. The next one has been to silently improve this situation. Version 5.1 should have quite a few improvements which allow to create accessible websites for anonymous users using the out-of-the-box theme and portlets such as those for navigation, forums, wiki, etc. (validated at least for WAI A compliance and often WAI AA compliance).

But we know that this is just the beginning. We still have many other portlets to review, issues will be found in those that have already been reviewed and also we have the larger challenge of making interactive functionalities accessible (posting in the forums, editing wiki pages, ...).

We believe that the fastest way to keep improving is to word out loud our intentions and involve all of those from the community interested in accessibility participate. This forum category has been explicitly created to let you freely talk about accessiblity in Liferay Portal. To complain about parts that are not accessible, to offer ideas of how to improve the weak parts, or whatever you feel like sharing. To start with I'd like to through out a question:

What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay?
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Erik Andersson, modificado 15 Anos atrás.

RE: What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay

Junior Member Postagens: 39 Data de Entrada: 08/04/08 Postagens Recentes
Very interesting topic Jorge, which IMHO concerns all of us working with Liferay. The basis of building accessible web sites is semantic, standards-based markup. Semantic markup will allow text-to-speach software to work better. Well-styled markup enables visually impaired users to resize text and content. But also, semantic standards-based markup will allow everyone a better user experience, and make our life as Liferay developers a whole lot of easier.

So, to cut to the chase, I believe that the most paramount issue for us to address would be to develop a standards-based css/markup framework for Liferay. Having discussed this briefly with Nate, I believe he has already started such a process. What would be the basis of such a framework? There are a lot of frameworks out there - Blueprint, YAML, 960 grid system, Tripoli, and many more. As Nate pointed out to me, all of these frameworks have their own strengths and weaknesses. Also, given the special needs of a portal environment, the smartest move is probably to create our own Liferay css/markup framework inspired by the best of the best from existing frameworks and techniques. A few important features needed, IMHO, are:
* Div-based markup instead of tables
* Fluid/elastic layouts, which enables the grid to scale with the text-size
* Relative units (em, ex or %) for for font sizes instead of px to ensure proper text-sizing in ie6.

But, in order not to hijack Jorge's thread, maybe a discussion about this should continue in its own post?

Another issue I find important is forms. Also here I believe the process has started migrating to Uni-Form (http://www.sprawsm.com/uni-form/). This would make great improvements to accessbility, usability, and help us building sleeker Liferay sites. How far has the Uni-Form migration gone?

A short list of other issues that would improve usability and accessibility:
* Move inline js and css to external files. Some of this has been done - but work still remains
* Use conditional stylesheets for ie-specific styles - ie.css for styles related to all versions, ie6.css, ie7.css and so on.
* Enable access keys for navigation - allows for quicker navigation on the website, in particular for users who do not use a mouse or who have difficulty gaining a visual overview of web pages.
* If a page is not found - a 404 page should be the standard response.
* A more lightweight rich text editor promoting semantic markup. Most users editing articles do not need all the features of FCK. While I know that FCK may be slimmed and even configured to use headings and paragraphs instead of the ugly size attribute, I still think a simple lightweight editor promoting standards-based markup would make a great contribution. Also, FCK adds a lot of weight to the page - so a slimmed script would enhance usability for administrators as well.

Finally, I have followed Liferay for quite a while now, and the progress that has been made (especially during the last year) when it comes to usability and accessibility is huge. I remember when core features where depending on javascript to work at all. You guys have done e great job so far! Now it's time to raise the bar even higher. With all of us in the Liferay community we have a great knowledge base. Fellow Liferayers unite. Let's step in and help make Liferay not only the best open source portal but also a leader when it comes to usability and accessibility!
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Jorge Ferrer, modificado 15 Anos atrás.

RE: What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay

Liferay Legend Postagens: 2871 Data de Entrada: 31/08/06 Postagens Recentes
Hi Erik,

Thanks for your feedback and ideas. I think it would be good to start discussing about specific actions to work on them in separate threads starting with the most important points. How much involved do you think you can get on this? Giving ideas, proposing solutions or all the way to providing patches?
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Erik Andersson, modificado 15 Anos atrás.

RE: What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay

Junior Member Postagens: 39 Data de Entrada: 08/04/08 Postagens Recentes
Hi Jorge,

I will be happy to contribute with all of your suggestions: ideas, solutions, and patches. The better Liferay gets, the less time I need to spend on doing the same markup changes over and over again.

I agree that we should structure specific actions in separate threads. I brought forward a few such issues in my first post. I'm sure there are a lot more ideas out there.
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Jorge Ferrer, modificado 15 Anos atrás.

RE: What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay

Liferay Legend Postagens: 2871 Data de Entrada: 31/08/06 Postagens Recentes
Awesome Erik!!

Anyone else out there that would like to share his/her thoughts about accessibility?
lee bodzak, modificado 15 Anos atrás.

RE: What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay

New Member Postagens: 6 Data de Entrada: 06/02/09 Postagens Recentes
Hi to everyone, my first post here and wondered what the status was of Liferay at the moment with regards to accessibility, wcag etc
I found this thread from google as I've been looking at Liferay recently, mainly looking for a good portal server for an intranet with a largish size user base.
I'm evaluating a few solutions at the moment to our requirements (we're also looking at commercial products but open source is attractive if it meets requirements) but I'm considering using a portal server as an aggregation method for other licensed applications such as people soft and interwoven teamsite. This would be our intranet solution and had been expecting that to make the site accessible, we would be coding the portlets from scratch anyway.
I'm presuming with Liferay that we can customize the whole layout using our own portlets making the whole site accessible and wondered whether this was possible?
We have some good accessibility knowledge and good java programmers in our company so standards aren't a problem.
Would this be alot of work?
Or is this discussion related to the problems with the provided portlets?
I'd like to know whether the layout templates were, or can be made accessible.
I was also very interested by the jquery integration with Liferay and having not really looked at any of the page code yet, wondered whether this was handled gracefully too.
Any thoughts and help are appreciated.
Cheers
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Jorge Ferrer, modificado 15 Anos atrás.

RE: What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay

Liferay Legend Postagens: 2871 Data de Entrada: 31/08/06 Postagens Recentes
Hi Lee,

If you are using mainly the portal framework you I think Liferay Portal will meet your accessibility requirements without problems. The default layout templates and themes should meet most accessibility guidelines if not all and it's also very easy to create your own that has a stricter compliance if required.

For the portlets, many of them produce accessible HTML, CSS and unobstrusive javascript when used for anonymous users and we are right now working on achieving the same for logged in users.

I'm going to start a thread to discuss and collaborate on the accessibility improvements for the next release (v5.3) so if you are experts in the subject it would be great if you could participate and provide ideas.
mr ed, modificado 15 Anos atrás.

RE: What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay

New Member Postagens: 6 Data de Entrada: 06/02/09 Postagens Recentes
Hi Jorge, thanks for your quick reply and sorry for not replying sooner!!

I'm currently at the evaluation stage and am also looking at Jetspeed, although Websphere and PeopleSoft are also possible options.
I'm an experienced java developer though am fairly new to JSR168 though the concepts are fairly straightforward.

The biggest obstacles for me at the moment are understanding portal server technologies and each seems to have it's own learnng curves (e.g. jetspeed and maven), caveats and build/deployment procedures.
I'm certainly no expert in accessibility/wcag or css though there are people in my team who are and I'll be asking them for their opinions and will be sure to pass any information on.

At the moment I'm mainly interested in how to implement layouts and how to make these available to administrators.
I noticed that the default layouts all seem to use table layouts which is a definite no-no from our requirements though I'm sure that with Liferay it should be possible to implement CSS layouts/themes.
We want to keep our markup as semantic as possible with no inlining of CSS or javascript and progressive enhancement techniques are what we are looking to use.

Currently the main issue for me is how to setup a development environment for Liferay and I'll learn alot from this and how Liferay works.
Traditionally we work with eclipse based IDE's and I am still trying to work out how best to achieve this with Liferay.
I'd like to do all my development within Eclipse (or MyEclipse) and be able to debug and deploy to a standalone Tomcat server (i.e. not bundled with the portal server) so I'll post other questions re best practices to other areas of the forum.

Thanks
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Jorge Ferrer, modificado 15 Anos atrás.

RE: What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay

Liferay Legend Postagens: 2871 Data de Entrada: 31/08/06 Postagens Recentes
Thanks for the info,

Feel free to keep asking questions in this forum category about any accessibility issue you may find.
Martin Smith, modificado 15 Anos atrás.

RE: What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay

New Member Postagens: 3 Data de Entrada: 02/03/09 Postagens Recentes
Hi Jorge,

I'm a UX designer and html/css coder working on a large public sector community portal in the UK. We've pretty much decided on Liferay as our platform of choice, and we're well aware that out-of-the-box it won't fully meet our requirements, and we'll have to do a fair bit of customisation work. I'm currently looking at how much work will be involved in making our solution fully accessible, which in the UK (and most of Europe) requires it to be fully AA compliant - in particular, I'm currently concerned with ensuring the xhtml is fully valid.

The main issue at this point (still early days, I'm sure there'll be more!) seems to be un-encoded ampersands. I know this has been addressed before, but as far as I can see the issue has not yet been resolved.

I found the following relevant posts/tickets:
http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/community/forums/-/message_boards/message/1578251
http://issues.liferay.com/browse/LEP-6481

There doesn't seem to have been any activity since August last year (in fact, I think you said you'd have a look again at the ticket when you got back from holiday ;-)

Could you provide an update on any progress you may have made towards fixing this problem (which after reading the above links I appreciate is a doozy!) please, with if possible any estimated timescales if you're still working on it? It would of course be really helpful if we didn't have to do any work to fix this, but really we need to know pretty quickly if we'll have to or not, while we're estimating work. timescales etc.

Thanks in advance!
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Jorge Ferrer, modificado 15 Anos atrás.

RE: What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay

Liferay Legend Postagens: 2871 Data de Entrada: 31/08/06 Postagens Recentes
Hi Martin,

Welcome! It's always great to have around people that know and care about accessibility. Making Liferay the most accessible possible tool out of the box is very important for us we just don't have enough time to improve as fast as we wanted. But we are very happy to hear ideas about how to improve in this area and will be glad to review any contributions you may send so that you don't have to maintain them release after release.

Regarding the XHTML validation, the reason why it's not done yet is because we run into some issues with the solutions suggested and didn't have time to search for a better one in time for 5.2. This is something that is in the roadmap for 5.3 and any help on your side would be greatly appreciated. Our idea would be to find a way to produce the right encoding out of the box instead of having to apply a post-processor lately.

Besides this we have many more ideas, including making collaboration portlets accessible for registered users, provide key-bindings for navigation and the most common operations and even to start playing with WAI-ARIA for some of the administration interfaces. If you have specific plans for improvements I'd like to encourage you to share them with the rest of the community through this forum so that we can coordinate and make sure it's done in a way that can be included in the next release.

PS: The 5.3 release is currently scheduled for September or October but note that the final release date may vary.
Martin Smith, modificado 15 Anos atrás.

RE: What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay

New Member Postagens: 3 Data de Entrada: 02/03/09 Postagens Recentes
Hi Jorge,

thanks for the swift and informative reply. Good to hear you're still working hard on this! I'm especially pleased to hear you're looking at ARIA - if you can implement this then you'll be well ahead of the field - I'm sure you'd see a big increase in use for public sector projects, especially in Europe. This is also something we intend to look at for this project.

While its still early days in terms of analysing your product for us (I'll keep posting as we find more...), off the top of my head the main show stoppers - things that are really essential for - us would be;

valid html
functioning non-JS fallbacks for everything
ensuring all the portlets that ship out of the box are accessible...

These really are essential for any use in the UK, especially public sector work.

Beyond that, key binding can be useful in certain circumstances, but I would view that as an enhancement - something to make it more accessible, whereas the others are essentials, things that stop it being inaccessible.

If possible, I'd be interested to know how likely you think it is that the enhancements you mentioned will make it into 5.3? We're due to launch in beta in September, so if its certain that you will have valid html and full functionality without JavaScript in there we can probably concentrate on enhancements and writing new functionality, whereas if its 50/50 then we'd probably have to look at those issues ourselves... I appreciate it may be too early or hard to say at this point, but if you don't ask...
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Jorge Ferrer, modificado 15 Anos atrás.

RE: What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay

Liferay Legend Postagens: 2871 Data de Entrada: 31/08/06 Postagens Recentes
Hi Martin,

It's good to see we are one the same page.

While we'll try to do our best to work on the mentioned improvements I cannot guarantee that they'll be ready for 5.3 since it also depends on how many people want to contribute to it. For that reason it would be great if you could help us out doing the changes you need and contributing them back.

What do you think?
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Kyrre Myrbostad, modificado 14 Anos atrás.

RE: What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay

Junior Member Postagens: 37 Data de Entrada: 21/01/09 Postagens Recentes
Hi, good to see that there is ongoing activity here.

I'm working at a university in Norway where we recently decided to go for Liferay as the main portal for our external website - and maybe also for an upgraded version of the intranet (still not decided though). This will replace our exisitng Oracle Portal and internal CMS (Escenic Publishing).

We are very much in the same situation as Mr Smith when it comes to accessibility issues. We need to have a validating portal with js-fallbacks for common tasks. Administration GUIs shouldn't really be a biggie, there we can wait for WAI-ARIA emoticon

I also have noticed that there are some redirecting going on before pages are rendered fully. This could be an issue for search-engine friendliness.

Anyway, my point is that we intend to get involved in this very soon and would like to contribute to making 5.3 as good as possible when it comes to accesibilty. What are the main obstacles today as you see it. The encoding of valid URLs have been mentioned, as well as js-fallbacks in some portlets - is that a good place for us to start?
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Jorge Ferrer, modificado 14 Anos atrás.

RE: What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay

Liferay Legend Postagens: 2871 Data de Entrada: 31/08/06 Postagens Recentes
Hi Kyrie,

Thanks for your proposal to help. Both tasks that you mention will welcome help from your side. My recommendation is to start small so that any changes you propose are easier to review and apply.

For URL encoding, we've recently created a new taglib <aui:a> that encodes the URLs and supports all the attributes of the regular HTML a tag as well as any custom one (though dynamic attributes). It would be very useful if you could help applying it to the core portlets. Also, as you do this try to identify any other situation in which the URL is currently not encoded and the taglib doesn't solve it to look for a new solution for it.
Asif Anwar, modificado 14 Anos atrás.

RE: What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay

New Member Postagens: 3 Data de Entrada: 01/01/10 Postagens Recentes
Hi Jorge,

Thanks to everyone how has posted in this tread so far, finding it and reading it has realy helped me grasp the reasons for some of the problems discussed in this thread.

In reply to the following bit of one of your messages above:
Jorge Ferrer:
For URL encoding, we've recently created a new taglib <aui:a> that encodes the URLs and supports all the attributes of the regular HTML a tag as well as any custom one (though dynamic attributes). It would be very useful if you could help applying it to the core portlets. Also, as you do this try to identify any other situation in which the URL is currently not encoded and the taglib doesn't solve it to look for a new solution for it.


I think I may have found some other situations in which the URL is currently not encoded correctly. I am unsure whither the taglib fixes these or not as I have yet to try and search for some documenation on the taglib.

The situations that I have found are as follows: In link tags where they are used to reference css files and in script tags where they are used to reference javascript files.

I have documented these in the following bug report for Liferay version 5.3: http://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS-6718

As a new user of Liferay it would be usefull if you could point me in the direction of any resources to familirise myself with the liferay codebase (so far I have not yet been able to isolate the points in code where the link and javascript tags are generated - through reading other bug reports and forum posts I think it may be in a view.jsp file somewhere but am unsure which one and / or where in one of these files)

regards,

Asif.
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Jorge Ferrer, modificado 14 Anos atrás.

RE: What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay

Liferay Legend Postagens: 2871 Data de Entrada: 31/08/06 Postagens Recentes
Hi Asif,

Thanks for the info. We'll take a look at the ticket before the next version reaches GA (General Availability)

Regarding your request for advice, there are a few pages in the wiki about the coding guidelines that you should read. Other than that the best way to learn about the code is by working on specific tasks. You'll soon see that everything is very patternized which makes it easier and easier to know how to find and change things over time.
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Julio Camarero, modificado 12 Anos atrás.

RE: What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay

Liferay Legend Postagens: 1668 Data de Entrada: 15/07/08 Postagens Recentes
Hi guys,

we have started a wiki page about Accessible Liferay Websites. Feel free to share any other site you know has an accessibility certification there.

cheers!
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Manuel de la Peña, modificado 14 Anos atrás.

RE: What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay

Regular Member Postagens: 116 Data de Entrada: 04/12/08 Postagens Recentes
Hello Jorge, i've found your post looking for make Liferay accessible.

I've written these posts to accomplish CSS2:

http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/community/forums/-/message_boards/message/4250347

And in spanish:
http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/community/forums/-/message_boards/message/4241082

Manuel.
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Jorge Ferrer, modificado 14 Anos atrás.

RE: What difficulties have you found creating accessible sites with Liferay

Liferay Legend Postagens: 2871 Data de Entrada: 31/08/06 Postagens Recentes
Thanks Manuel.