[dokuwiki] Re: barrier free website with dokuwiki as CMS?
- From: Michael Hamann <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: dokuwiki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:18:23 +0100
Hi,
Andreas Benzler schrieb:
>> What is barrier free?
[...]
Barrier free means that a website is accessible for everyone. Everyone
includes any kind of disabled people, most often you think of blind
people, but there are also people that just have problems with some
color combinations. But there are also physically handicapped people
that e.g. have problems with buttons that are too small.
Barrier free means that there isn't any content hidden in images that
don't have any alternative text (especially the navigation might be an
issue) and usually and (among others) that the website works without
Javascript, too.
I don't see any need for a special template or a special version and I
think DokuWiki will provide most of these things. You might provide a
link to jump directly to the wiki content or the toc.
In general you can test a website with a browser like lynx and if the
result is usable, the website should be usable by blind people, too.
The rest depends on the content. If you massively use images without
describing their content, your content won't be barrier free. And of
course you should use elements in the way they should be used (e.g.
don't use headings to get large and bold text, only use them for real
headings...), use lists for lists and so on. And what I've learned from
a blind fellow student is, that PDFs aren't accessible in many cases,
that means screenreaders can't extract the text in a way that is
readable (e.g. you end up with one character per line). This is
especially true for PDFs created with LaTeX.
And the content itself should be logically structured, shouldn't contain
too many foreign words and abbreviations, in short: everyone should be
able to understand it, neither depending on the age nor the literacy of
the person. This can also be extended to the structure of the whole website.
The next thing is: color contrast. There are people that are unable to
see the difference between red and green and so on. For these people you
should take care that there is enough contrast between the colors you
use and that you don't use critical color combinations. And of course
the font size should be so large that you can easily read it and it
should be resizable even in Internet Explorer 6 and so on.
So all in all it isn't that easy, but if you obey to some simple rules
and test the site in a browser like lynx, there shouldn't be many
problems left (apart from the colors, but as wiki designs normally
aren't that fancy that should be such a problem).
Nevertheless I am not an expert but such a complex thing like a barrier
free website in fact needs an expert. For a good (German) example you
can look at the website of the Bundesrat, http://www.bundesrat.de/, I
think it's a good example of a website that looks nice but is completely
barrier free (and without providing a plaintext version, in the ages of
CSS-based layouts you don't need that).
If you want to hear more about that you might also listen to the talk
Sebastian Andres hold at the 23c3, he himself is blind and talks about
the barrier free web, you can get the video at
http://chaosradio.ccc.de/23c3_m4v_1670.html (it's German). But is I
mentioned above, barrier free doesn't only target blind people, but many
different kinds of disabilities. There is also the German website
http://www.einfach-fuer-alle.de/ that explains the whole topic and has
good examples, too.
And in general I would say DokuWiki is relatively barrier free, it
depends more on what you are doing with it.
Greetings,
Michael
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