Pachy Dev Call Notes
3/21/08

Present: Clayton, Eric, Tim, Lou

Clayton will post the latest functionality and accessibility fixes later today.

Tab order in Flash is taken over by a screen reader when it is active and we don't have any way to control this. So Clayton has created one tab order functionality for keyboard navigation when a screen reader is not active, and the tab order will behave differently when a screen reader IS active. This should not be a problem because screen reader users normally use the arrow keys to navigate through the content, not the tab key.

Problems with new templates and CDL's 2.1 test instance:
Lou sent screen shots of two exception errors to Clayton that came up when trying to use the latest 2.1 templates with CDL's 2.1 test instance.'

One error was in the formation of the url to an already published presentation. Clicking on the "View Presentation" button generated a url that had extra text at the beginning of the url ("localhost"

The other error occurs when trying to preview or publish (other parts of authoring worked fine).

Clayton will check the Plist file for errors. This may be one source of the problem.

Eric will try the new Plist if Clayton finds errors. Otherwise, Eric will put the old templates back on the server and see if the problems go away.


Increased Font size and slider titles:
Eric sent an example solution of how to handle display space for slider titles when Increased Font Size is on for accessibility. The two methods were using rollover text to display larger type, the other was to just increase the text size and let it wrap.

The group agreed that increasing the spacing between slider items to accommodate the larger text was a good solution. Clayton said that this was doable technically.

Another idea discussed was to enlarge the whole Flash presentation - either within the Flash playback stage, or by enlarging the Flash stage within the browser. Clayton said he would experiment with the latter. The former can already be done using control-click (or right-click) within the Flash window. This allows the user to zoom the Flash presentation to double it's normal size, and then to use the mouse to scroll around the enlarged Flash area.

Two other behaviors for the Slider which have been discussed in the past and seem to have slipped through the cracks are:

1) Once a slider point is hilighted, it should stay hilighted until another slider point has been entered. This gives the user a persistent visual indication of which slider point is currently being displayed.

2) Clicking on a slider point activates media playback. Many of us have seen users do this instinctively and think it should be supported.

Clayton said he could do both of these things.

Clayton had a question about whether holding down the arrow key inside a scrolling text field should auto-repeat the scrolling of text. Everyone agreed this would be good.

Clayton brought up that Joel had reported that text scrolling in the current templates was slow. Clayton had a question about whether this was true, or whether it appeared this way because the text in the template tests was just a lot of the same paragraph repeating over and over.

This raised the question in Lou's mind of whether there are other performance problems with the current templates. Joel (and others) should look for this in his testing.

Last item was the need to move the row of accessibility function icons down 5-6 pixels to accommodate their placement on the Zoom template. All agreed that lowering them this amount on all the templates was not a problem.