kuniform

Hiya. I’ll be presenting on Rails, Ajax, and Universal Design at RailsConf 1.0, and I would like to get input from attendees as to what topics and concerns most interest them.

Initially, I thought to give a fairly broad overview on accessibility and usability, giving folks pointers on

• accessibility: legal frameworks, nature of disabilities and assistive technologies


• usability: how heuristic evaluation, cognitive walkthroughs and other expert inspection methods can be used guerilla style with RoR


• features and trade-offs of RoR + Ajax: how to evaluate and decide when to use Ajax

Then, you’d get a resources handout with links and reference material to learn more. The goal of the presentation would be to give developers an introduction to usability and accessibility concerns as well as some tools to evaluate and improve your own web pages. In particular, we’d examine a few examples of Ajax as used on script.aculo.us and a few examples of RoR forms to understand how they’d perform for disabled users or people using assistive technologies.

That was the intial idea. The more I drill into it, the more I see there’s probably 3 hours of material there, or 3 days. Not 25 minutes’ worth, which is what I am aiming for, so we can have plenty of Q&A and some group exercises.

So, the second idea was to focus less on the legal framework for accessibility, and more on the coding of it, by creating a sample RoR application and showing where in the views you could put which code snippets, etc. I’d highlight Mark Pilgrim’s work on diveintoaccessibility.org, Jim Thatcher’s evaluation techniques, and areas within the RoR framework that support accessibility (like label tags in the scaffold view _form pages, etc.).

Attendees would walk away with some code examples, but maybe not much in the way of background.

After hearing that many of the folks at the Canada On Rails conference were relative newbies to RoR, I wondered which would be more useful—an overview of RoR and universal design, or a very discrete, yet context-less view into code that provides for accessibility. Right now, it’s a super-high level run through of all these items, and a few examples of both code and screen reader captures.

One of the most disappointing things at a conference is going to a particular session and then feeling like you missed out on a more informative one in the same time slot. To help you avoid that feeling, please give me your accessibility/usability and RoR concerns/questions below, and I’ll do my best to address them. Thanks!