Documentation Wiki

Usability & Accessability

Google Summer of Code 2008 Project
Difficulty: medium
Required experience: Usability, Accessability, xHTML, CSS, PHP
Mentor: Steffen Voß, kaffeeringe.de∞
Usability is one of the future hot topics. Now that we have a wide range of applications that do almost everything we can imagine it is the next task of software development to make the programs do what we want them to do as easy as possible. There are organisations working on specifications and standards like the WAI∞ or openusability.org∞.

Postnuke was one of the earliest adopters of webstandards. It is one of the first webapplication frameworks to remove all layout tables and support correct tagging of abbreviations aso. With the new .8 core much of these ideas have consolidated. But indeed there is much to be done in support of user interaction.

This project could include a complete evaluation of the core and some central modules, the creation of UI guidelines and the implementation of examples: templates, css classes, icons and whatever helps developers to have a consistent and easy to use user interface.

Evaluation of the status quo

What are the key issues in Postnuke's usability with special regard to accessability? The Postnuke .8 core consists of only a few system modules for user handling, permissions, the layouts, system settings, security aso. We will include 2-3 content modules for this project so other module developers can learn from the example. So the evaluation will concern:

• Postnuke Core (installation, configuration)
• Content (Content Management)
• MediaAttach? (Media Repository)

Find solutions

Find solutions according to web standards. Are there already projects that developed models for these problems (e.g. Yahoo Design Patterns?). What are the alternatives? Which one is the best to fit our users needs? You won't have to invent everything yourself. If there are good ideas available - use them.

Implement the solutions

The implementation could happen in several variations:

• For some parts a written style-guide could be useful
• Better are example templates and ready-made templates, plugins, css classes. There could be example implementations for example for lists, for sortable lists, for drag&drop lists.
• There might be the need for php code written, when it takes away the need to think about usability for the module developer. For example Postnuke contains a forms framework that includes input validations but maybe there are ideas for easier user interaction that might result in the change of the forms framework.

Links

• ATAG∞
• WCAG∞
• WAI-ARIA∞
• openusability.org∞
• Yahoo Design Pattern Library∞