We need help on the LS 2 User Interface.

A very rough start at a question library and comps is located at design.limesurvey.org/

Note: currently, the DoJo javascript lib hasn't been re-hooked into the forms. It will be updated by Friday COB.

I'll post a few ideas/comps over the next week.

If you would like to participate in the UI design + engineering, please advise!

Looking forward,
Juhan

I really like the designs shown on the testpages. There are a lot of new and pretty good ideas and in general it looks much more modern.

Great job so far!

One question: Will there be a barrier-free design, too?

Best regards,
Mazi

Mazi,

Barrier-free design = ?

Thanks,
Juhan

I checked out design.limesurvey.org/ and i like the look and feel of new design for LS 2.0. Amazing work

Hi Juhan,

maybe I chose the wrong translation. In German it's "barrierefreie Website", meaning that websites should be designed in a way so that handicapped people can access them without any problems but it also means to use valid HTML, offer alternatives for javascript (which might be disabled) and so on.

Have a look at the wikipedia article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility#Tele...on_technology_access

I have talked to Carsten and he said that this is a feature that would be nice to have. In Germany Limesurvey is used at universities a lot and there is a law saying that government websites should be "barrierefrei".

If you have any more questions feel free to ask.

Beste regards,
Mazi

Gotcha Mazi.

Another term for barrier-free is accessibility.

Allowing disabled users to access surveys is one of our goals. Dojo has been on the front lines of accessibility (such as translating pages for screen readers). However, newer services leveraging the latest rendering + data viz techniques choke on outputting the data in a format that visually-impaired users can consume easily. At the recent Ajax Conference in Boston, an IBM engineer gave a demo of the latest and greatest accessibility options. Even her demo site which was designed for 'barrier-free' access, failed a good chunk of the time.

Side note: accessibility should be constructed and managed at the OS-level, not at the browser level... but that's a whole different discussion.


Mazi, we're conscious of the different folks who will use LS2. Our intentions are to construct a service that degrades gracefully (hopefully DoJo will help)... we can't guarantee every screen reader will nicely consume LS2. Once we get closer to distro/beta, we'll update the forum with our accessibility progress.

If you want to specifically participate in the QA and barrier-free construction, join us!

-Juhan

Hello Juhan,

thanks for the information concerning your planings for accessibility.

Unfortunately I don't have the time to join you as a full time developer. But if you have finished the first layouts I will try to help with finding errors or to make suggestions to improve the design. So if you are looking for betatesters feel free to contact me.

I'm really looking forward to LS2.

Best regards,
Mazi

No need to be a full-timer. Most OS projects have contributors who engage with the community for just an hour a week.


Shoot us email and we can coordinate.

Thanks Mazi,
Juhan

Hi,

if desired, I can give you a list of what has to be taken into account regarding the accessibility. We have done some research on the accessibility-topic and the result is a list divided into the sections "must be considered", "should be considered" and "nice to have".

I don't know much about your background knowledge but as you are an experienced designer I think you are familiar with this issue.

Greetings from Germany,
Mazi

Hello

For everyone out there: I'm one of the designers along with Juhan working on LS2.0 - I work in Boston as a contractor for Juhan's company specifically on this project. I haven't posted yet (until now!) My role includes overall experience design, user interface/interaction design, and XHTML/CSS coding.

re: accessibility and barrier-free access; these are general terms that need to be qualified. There is no such thing as "it is accessible" because there have to be a set of guidelines by which you are being accessible and you have to be clear about what types of impairments you are accommodating. These guidelines are not well standardized (yes, I know about US's section 508 and various government rules but many of these lack adequate demos/samples and leave a lot to subjective opinion).

All that said, I actually have a lot of background (relative to most people) with web accessibility and don't consider it a secondary add-on to the design process. So, I am working this stuff into designs now. Some things that I can offer to date:

* AJAX is a problem; no question there. Right now, most of the LS2 stuff is not requiring extensive AJAX stuff. We are using DOJO, who's accessibility considerations I am not entirely familiar with. The primary issue will be screen reader access to DOM-written content and being aware of new content on the page (this is the largest issue with AJAX and screen-reader accessibility). To date, I have yet to hear of a solution for this issue (juhan, that goes for DOJO too).
* Motor impairments: access keys can be enabled for functions when we get closer to a firm alpha. We are serializing the markup/code such that as you tab through pages, the ordering makes sense. Skip links can also be added once we get closer to a final design for key areas.
* Partial-vision/color impairments: LS will be entirely skinnable. This can mean starting completely over with your own css (not recommended!) or just swapping out the color and font files with your own. All color rules are being isolated into one sheet so that it is easy to create high-contrast versions etc. The current design is sorta rough and any contrast issues (lack thereof) can easily be fixed at a global level.
* text-resize in IE6 will be supported natively in the browser.

If there are specific items that you'd like us to address, or you know have existed in LS1, please let me know. Maybe there is a bug track list for these items? I havent checked yet.

thanks!
Brian