[Home-on-the-range] NFBk State Web Site

[Peter Donahue]

Good afternoon everyone,

    Content management systems are a mixed bag for the blind. Several years 
ago I had the chance to work with the CMS that our national office uses for 
managing NFB Web sites. We found that although one could enter text as if it 
was being entered in to a word document there were accessibility problems. 
For example one could select a block of text on witch to perform an 
operation but if one move the cursor to the controls to add highlights, 
change the font type, etc the text was deselected. There were other 
accessibility issues discovered with that system as well. I'm not sure if 
any progress has been made to remedy these issues.

    A number of blind people use Drupal successfully however one must use 
HTML markup for creating and formatting Web content.

    I recently became aware of another CMS developed by an Australian 
company and marketed by Adobe called "Business Catalyst." One of my paying 
clients is interested in using this CMS for her Web site. I checked with the 
technology folks at our national office to see if they've played with it. So 
far they haven't checked it out to evaluate its accessibility and usability 
by the blind. This will be a project for me to persue later this year after 
we move and are settled in to our new place. Hope this helps.

Peter Donahue

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Stanzel, Susan - Kansas City, MO" <susan.stanzel at kcc.usda.gov>
To: "NFB of Kansas Internet Mailing List" <home-on-the-range at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 2010 1:55 PM
Subject: Re: [Home-on-the-range] NFBk State Web Site


Do you know how these work with screen readers? I would suggest talking with 
Gary Wunder the chairman of the Web committee. He can best explain what 
other affiliates are doing. If you like I will persue that.

Susie

From: home-on-the-range-bounces at nfbnet.org 
[mailto:home-on-the-range-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Chapman
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 2010 1:50 PM
To: NFB of Kansas Internet Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Home-on-the-range] NFBk State Web Site

Hey Floyd,

I was actually thinking that a content management system would be a great 
idea for the affiliate website.

In short this would be a system that would allow authorized people to make 
content postings without having to worry about formatting and stuff. This 
would allow us to develop a design once and then focus on content 
generation/delivery in a fashion not unlike wikipedia (though with much 
better access controls and without everybody seeing an "edit" link).

This would also help with the "one webmaster" problem and allow the many 
people in our affiliate who are great at creating content to more easily 
leverage their skills.

Examples of these systems include:
http://www.scribus.net/ (using drupal) and
http://berkeley.edu/ (running TikiWiki)

These are very simple to install as they simply require put a few files on 
the server just like a regular web page, and could be maintained fairly 
easily.

I think it would make building/maintaining/updating the site a lot slicker 
and make it easier to integrate some of our other projects like posting our 
newsletter, meeting minutes and/or convention media.

If your interested I can use my old netbook to put together a demo of a 
couple of these packages for state convention so people can get a feel for 
what it would look like and how it might work.

Just a thought.

--
Andrew Chapman



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