[Blindmath] n-lab questions

Fri Nov 6 19:48:33 UTC 2009

Hello Andrew.  I just spent a few minutes looking at a few N-lab web 
pages. Reading with Internet Explorer, the MathPlayer plug-in, and 
Window-Eyes, the math read easily.  You are right that the page 
structure could be improved a bit though.  While they are all 
accessible, they could be more blind-friendly.  There is an awful lot of 
repetitive structure at the top (TAB order top anyhow) of many pages. 
The big problem for most blind people is finding a way to skip all this 
stuff and get to the main content.  I notice that on most Discussion 
pages the main content is a H1 but usually the third H1 on the page.  It 
would be really good for frequent users if the main content could be the 
first heading of some kind, if not H1, then how about assigning H2 to be 
the main content?  I also notice that not all "main content" actually 
has a heading at all.  For example, I clicked on your name but did not 
find your information by looking at the headings.  I searched and found 
you, but this is not the ideal way to find the page main content.

So adopting a consistent philosophy for using headings would help a lot. 
  But the math looks really straightforward, both editing and reading. 
Good work.  I'd love to help you make your SVG's accessible though.

John

On 11/6/2009 12:23 AM, Andrew Stacey wrote:
> Gosh, so many answers and I haven't even asked a question yet!  I'd better do
> so quickly to avoid breaking the 3rd law of L-space ("Do not interfere with
> the nature of causality.").
>
> My first barrage of questions are to do with the n-lab, and the instiki
> program that runs it.  In short, how do we rate as regards accessibility?
>
> Some people have already started answering that, which is great, and I've also
> read back a little in the archives so you can assume I'm familiar with your
> recent discussions.  In particular, it seems that we score highly because we
> serve MathML rather than inline images or some other hybrid system.  But I'm
> sure that accessibility is about more than just the doctype!
>
> First, a little more background to the project.  The n-lab, as I said earlier,
> is like an open lab book.  So it's primary focus is to help a group of people
> (mainly mathematicians) to do their research.  As such, it's a bit like any
> lab book: some coherent notes, some write-ups of seminars, some distilled
> wisdom from the literature, and a lot of scribblings.  The key difference is
> that it happens in the open so that anyone can stop by, read our scribblings,
> and offer advice or get ideas themselves.  In short, we think that "open
> source" should apply to mathematics as well as programming.  So for us,
> accessibility is important because it means that our scribblings can be read
> by as many as possible and thus we can learn from as many people as possible.
>
> A little on the technical side: instiki is written in ruby-on-rails and serves
> XHTML with MathML and SVG.  The input format is a hybrid of extended markdown
> syntax with itex2mml as the mathematical engine.  Other mathematical engines,
> such as blahtex, are possible but we use itex2mml.  The main maintainer of
> instiki is also the main maintainer of itex2mml, Jacques Distler.  Whilst not
> directly involved in the content of the n-lab, he keeps a close eye on how
> we're doing as we're one of the largest examples of his software.
>
> Now on to my questions.  Let me divide them into three categories.
>
>
> 1. The underlying program, instiki.  This is where I am least involved so
> don't really know how to phrase a good question.  I know that Jacques Distler
> is keen for Instiki to do all it can to be accessible and he would like to
> hear of any ideas that anyone has to do that.  Either you can contact him
> directly, or I can pass along any comments anyone has.
>
> 2. The overall feel of the n-lab.  Certain aspects of the n-lab website are
> globally controlled, such as the main CSS and the navigation that is on each
> page.  We've been thinking that the style of the n-lab is a little off-putting
> - it's a little stark, to say the least!  How do we rate in terms of
>    accessibility at the moment?  And if we start playing around with the style,
> are there any words of advice you can give us (or point us to) to ensure that
> we are more accessible?  In particular, is it safe to simply modify the CSS,
> on the grounds that CSS can always be disabled from the client end?  Are there
> any obvious things to avoid (I've heard that tables for layout are a big no-no
> from an accessibility point of view).  One other thing that springs to mind
> are the page names.  At the start, we had the convention that page names
> should be drawn from a basic character set, so no fancy unicode characters
> like "infinity".  Is this useful, or completely indifferent?  How do screen
> readers cope with the range of unicode characters?
>
> 3. The content of each page.  There are many contributors to the n-lab and we
> don't like to impose rules and regulations but we do feel able to offer
> guidance and we do tend to keep the style reasonably homogeneous.  Is there
> a simple list of things that we can ask authors to keep in mind as they write?
> We do have a group of self-styled "lab elves" who go around cleaning up pages,
> and who take more notice of these style conventions.
>
> I also use instiki for a course that I'm teaching, but I think that there's
> nothing particular for that which wouldn't be relevant to the n-lab.  We also
> have a forum attached to the n-lab.  I'd imagine that that scores very low on
> accessibility, but I'm less worried about that; partly because that's for
> internal discussions rather than to be read by casual visitors, and also
> because I'd like to redesign the software for that from the ground up to make
> it easier to integrate with the n-lab proper and it would be easier to put in
> accessibility then rather than try to impose it on a piece of software that
> I don't really understand the deep workings of.
>
> Some relevant links:
>
> The n-lab itself: http://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage
>
> Instiki: http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/wiki/instiki/show/HomePage
>
> Jacques Distler's blog: http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andrew Stacey
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blindmath mailing list
> Blindmath at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindmath_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for Blindmath:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/blindmath_nfbnet.org/john.gardner%40orst.edu
>