The OATS project is working hard to ensure this site is as accessible and usable as possible.  Please use this noticeboard topic to discuss this or tell us about problems/bugs you have found with accessiblity or usability.

You can also report bugs using the 'trac' system, or email us.

Errors reported on BCAG mailing list (summary/transcript):

Original Mail

Hi,

I am on the OATS consortium [1] - we have recently released www.oatsoft.org which I believe has been discussed recently on this forum.

I was disappointed to hear that it had been discussed in negative terms regarding accessibility - since we are striving hard to make sure that the site is as accessible as possible.  Could you send me details of your problems, on/off list and we will strive to sort them out - please be as specific in reporting the bug as possible.

In general - the OATS project is about helping people find software more easily, promoting open source and encouraging developers to develop innovative software derived directly from user's needs.  This was a pilot project and essentially the project was funded/developed using 'spare' resources (!) - i.e. we are not a big corporate and there are/will be bugs. However, we have produced (IMHO) what was/is/will be a good resource, we are now looking for ways to take the project forward.

Please feel free to get involved on the site (it is a community) and to send bugs/comments on/off list. 

One final note, I was disappointed that no one contacted any of us directly with problems - surely this would be a more constructive way of getting accessibility issues with websites sorted?  We are keen to get these issues sorted (it is, obviously, core to the site) - other sites etc would need more diplomatic persuasion.

Anyway, please don't flame me! (-;

Cheers

Simon

Simon Judge
 
[1] OATS Consortium: http://www.oatsoft.org/Info/Project/OatsConsortium/

List Reply 1:

Simon

I would strongly disagree with your statement that the site was discussed negatively. The simple fact which was stated was that the home page could not be used by people using jaws 6.2 and 7.0.

The only information visible to these versions of jaws was the strap line or page title at the very top of the page and a heading level 1 with the word Oats in it. Nothing else could be seen without a lot of effort and a good knowledge of jaws, not even the link to let you know about it.

Wally Harding
RNIB Hi-tech Support

List Reply 2:

OATS reply/follow up:

Sorry, that is the problem with getting things second hand and not being able to look at a list archive.

That is a right pain.. Has anyone found any bugs with other readers?  The front page validates to strict XHTML on W3C... Though i've just noticed some CSS bugs. The only bug listed I can find for PLONE is here: http://dev.plone.org/plone/ticket/4764 - there looks like a semi fix.

Anyway,i'll check it out, thanks for the feedback. 

Cheers

Simon

PLONE users thread

• Reply RE the random CSS files

OATS second reply

Thanks.  Erm, could you send me your outlined suggestion - as far as I can see, this list has no archive (no comments RE usability!) so I can not refer to it.

RE accessibility standards - well, that page validates [1]. Obviously, this isn't everything  and the title was misleading (so i've changed it).

Also, yes, I agree we shouldn't hide the titles of the pages in link title properties - though I don't think this is inherently inaccessible, since there is a trade off between simplicity of page and 'hidden' content.  I've thus also quickly changed that page [2].  I'm still not quite happy about the added complexity, so will probably tweak some more (maybe concatenating the description to a single line).

I have also, I hoped, fixed the CSS validation errors we had encountered [3].  I'd be interested if this has fixed the JAWS errors reported (I will independently test too).

I'll feed the CSS issue and the sitemap code/suggestion back to PLONE - this is the power of open source.

I'm still interested about how, as a group, you feed back accessibility issues to website designers. 

Cheers

Simon

[1] http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.oatsoft.org/sitemap
[2] http://www.oatsoft.org/sitemap
[3] http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oatsoft.org%2Fsitemap&usermedium=all