/Access all areas/ Superblogging
04/05/2007 | Filed under Develop > Access all areas
This edition, Nomensa’s director of user experience, Alastair Campbell, checks out whether Superblogging is really accessible.
Superblogging is a website design and content management software program that you download, use to create your website, and upload to a server. Creating an accessible content management program is a particularly challenging task, as you have to tackle it from several perspectives.
There are guidelines from the W3C for this, called the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (www.w3.org/TR/ATAG10). There are three main criteria that a tool should fulfil: it should produce accessible output by default, encourage (or require) the creation of accessible content, and be accessible in use. A simple way of testing a product is to set up a default site and analyse the output. The second step is to see how easy it is for people using the product to create accessible content.
The default site from Superblogger is valid HTML (barring a couple of stray table closing tags that appear to have been left over), and uses a flexible CSS layout. Once you dig a little deeper, some strange things appear: the alternative text for each image matches the heading, rather than describing the image, the homepage has a blank heading level 3 and only heading 4s in the content area, and the navigation doesn’t use lists.
Going through the interface, each section of the content area follows a set format, with a heading, image and paragraph(s). When you add a picture, there’s no place to add alternative text, or make it a requirement. On closer inspection, the alternative text is copied from the heading, which is rarely relevant.
Some issues could be tackled by changing the templates and removing the extraneous title, tabindex and accesskey attributes from the menu links. You could also change the heading structure. However, where items are repeated, such as the menu links, you can’t add a list around the list items. You also can’t alter code used for images (which is simply <!--Picture. value-->). Without access to the internals of the code, a developer can only make limited adjustments.
Overall, the product enables the quick and easy creation of a website, even compared to tools aimed at professionals. However, the default output and ongoing maintenance is quite limited, especially in terms of accessibility.
Comments
Gary Molton / 13/06/2007 / 09:29 / http://www.engineeringweb.co.uk
As the developer of this software I’d like to make a few comment.
The review is fair an accurate but there are good reasons for most of the above and they can generally be changed by other developers.
Firstly the program is intended to be very fast and easy for ‘secretaries’ to use to maintain a website. It’s surprising how little non skilled people can do and programs like Joomla can be way too much. They just don’t add picture alt tags so by making this the heading for that paragraph there is generally some relevant description there. Not perfect I know but you can embed lots of pictures in the paragraph itself and customise each alt tag there.
The stray table tag is to allow the program to make multi-column pages. It’s the only way we found to stop the IE peekaboo bug but can be removed from the template. Using divs instead of lists for the menu was another workaround to give better stability and control across browsers. There is a CSS wizard that customises the templates and this would just not work if we had to build in IE workarounds to control the height to lists etc. Because there are so many possibilities with this program it took a lot of work to find stable cross browser layouts. We do refine these for clients when we know what the site will contain but the standard has to be robust.
Any developer can design their own template and just replace the text with the program’s tags. List menus would be fine. There is also a default directory where the picture code can be changed. Every piece of text on the final page can be edited by the developer.
We’d argue that the program is more accessible because it does things automatically that people entering content can never be trusted to do. We’d also argue it’s a great productivity tool for developers because they can hand code their own templates exactly as they wish and maintain large sites very quickly. By building the links, titles and alt tags etc automatically they can supply good low budget site when the price to supply hand code quality pages is just not an option.
Gary Molton / 19/06/2007 / 15:44 / http://www.engineeringweb.co.uk
Me Again.
Sensitive to the comments and on reflection we decided to add an extra box to allow people to enter their own alt text for each picture. Valid for version 2.61 and above.
AlastairC / 20/06/2007 / 10:18 / http://www.nomensa.com
Hi Gary, good to hear from you.
I wouldn't dispute that the product is good for certain situations, on the points you raised, I would say:
- There are probably CSS solutions for some of the IE issues you've had, although I haven't looked into the CSS wizard.
- Text alternatives shouldn't be automatically generated, there are better ways to get people to enter good alternative text.
And ask:
- How would you create a valid list for the navigation? This wasn't apparent from the support documentation.
- Where is the directory of editable code? This also wasn't apparent in the documentation.
Have you looked into ATAG? (Link in the article). As a web site generation tool, these are the guidelines you should be using.
Gary Molton / 01/07/2007 / 15:48 / http://www.straight2web.net
Thanks for the reply Alastair
- You are correct, there are CSS solutions for each issue but we’ve tried to create a modular range of page layouts that beginners can use and change sizes, colours, picture positions and borders etc. themselves, without coding. This proved incredibly difficult to make reliable in all browsers and configurations. The table wrapper is the only bug fix we use but it can be removed in most cases and all cases if you know what fixes to use for each IE peculiarity that might arise.
- We’ve changed the program now so a unique picture Alt text can be added.
Also
- The support was not that clear or up to date so I’ve re-written it and added a list example at http://www.superblogging.net/C5.htm
- The location of the default directory that contains a lot of the code snippets is given in the project section of the setup screen. We do hide a lot of the clever information so that the basic users who simply add the content do not get confused.
I did look at ATAG and decided that to comply we’d have to move away from our original approach of doing everything for people without them realising. In general I’m confident the program is pretty good. Mainly because it is aimed at the basic site end of the market but with the facility to let experts add what they want. I will go through the spec again in detail soon and check a rating. Plus make changes if necessary.
Gary Molton / 14/07/2007 / 11:46 / http://www.searchengineoptimizedcms.com
OK I've been through the ATAG standard in detail and the finished site is as accessible as it could be. However the standard says that entering content and checking must also be built in to conform.
WIth our software being PC based it has certain advantages over web based solutions but is not yet fully accessible to people with dissabilities. We'll improve this next build.
We recommend people use code checkers like html validator to check their finished sites and have no plans to build these features into the program as it would never be as good a the proper tools. Unfortunately this means we can never achieve the tripple A status unless we supplied both programs together some how.
So in summary the sites genereated could be tripleA but using the CMS itself does not yet conform.
Martha Powers / 07/08/2007 / 20:08
Not mentioned here is the beyond exceptional support given to novices like myself. Immediate, comprehensive, relevant. And so very rare.
Richard Morton / 09/10/2007 / 16:36 / http://www.qm-consulting.co.uk/
I think that the subject of content management raises some interesting points regarding accessibility testing of websites. Whilst in some systems there is a clear delineaion between what is content management and what isn't, for many many sites there are elements of web authoring going on that perhaps need testing in slightly different ways.
If for example I was asked to test this (http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/the-accessibility-test/superblogging) page for accessibility I would need to take into account the web authoring guidelines because posting comments is effectively content management.
I guess the point I am making is that there probably shouldn't be two sets of guidelines. The auhoring tools guidelines were obviously originally written with tools like Dreamweaver in mind. I'd be interested to know how well the various elements of Microsoft Office and Open Office match up against the guidelines. My guess would be that they would both fail miserably.
