dojotoolkit & accessibility

[denise]

In discussion in #gsoc this afternoon, one of the project mentors from DojoToolkit mentioned that they're the first JS toolkit with full accessibility support in their base widgets. We should totally look into it!

(Edit: He also PMed me to say: "if you have immediate questions, our community info can be found here: http://dojotoolkit.org/get-involved/ and I can be found here: http://ktiedt.dojotoolkit.org/gsoc/2010/karl.html", and offered whatever help we would need with integration ... his DW username is ktiedt, so welcome.)

Comments

[jadelennox]

Dude! Also, I keep staring at my open bugs and not doing anything on them, so looking into Dojo might be a good way for me to get back in the swing of things.

[jadelennox]

For reference, since it took some finding, the accessibility info for Dijit, the UI library.

...And I'm really tempted to swipe their accessibility testing guidelines. For when we have a test procedure.

[pauamma]

Great. Just as I had about talked myself into taking a look at that newfangled jQuery thing. You did that on purpose, right? :-)

(Joke aside, does it and jQuery provide the same or similar features, or do they complement each other?)

[foxfirefey]

From my limited readings, Dojo goes beyond what jQuery does, so they don't really compliment each other, but don't clash.

[ktiedt]

dojo focus's heavily on namespacing to prevent clashing with other frameworks. Anything jQuery can do, you can do with Dojo. It just might take more than one().line().of().chained().code().that().goes().on().for(ever); :P

btw

[ktiedt]

Do feel free to ping me by any of the means listed on the webpage Denise listed, I really don't care which way you choose just make sure I know who you are :P

If someone wants to point out a place where you might want to use more JS to improve a page... I'll gladly start giving some advice/mockups of what that page might look like with Dojo involved :)

[afuna]

I'm concerned: we are already working with two libraries (the one we inherited from LJ, and the more recent jQuery). If we add dojo, that's yet another series of behavior/syntax/rules that devs will need to know, depending on which page they're working on.

I don't think they they'll conflict as code (well... the current/old JS library might :-) it messes up jQuery something fierce, unless you load jQuery first, haven't tried dojo), but I'm worrying over fragmenting the dev efforts this way.

[ktiedt]

I would think the idea would be to move to one consolidated library that achieves your goals instead of piece-mealing them together -- porting to dojo is rather straight forward and usually quite simple -- I'm here because I offered to help in that effort if Dojo does meet those requirements yall have set :)

[afuna]

We definitely want to phase out the old library! But it's been tagged a bit of a long term project so far.

[jadelennox]

Fu, from my reading, the real gain here is something that we wouldn't get from jQuery, which is the widget library, which has the vaunted accessibility features. How should we go about exploring this to see if it's worth further exploration given the cycles which have been put into jQuery so far? Should we have the various accessibility testers test the available widgets to see if we really do find them accessible?

[ktiedt]

I am volunteering to help in conversion if yall deem the accessibility worthy :)
Our a11y team is actually headed by a group from IBM (which has vested interest in keeping a11y a high priority) so its always a forefront of discussion in that regards (and tested all the time by them)

I would recommend doing testing at: http://archive.dojotoolkitorg/nightly/dojotoolkit/dijit/tests/ which will be our current nightly checkout (from the night before) which will closest resemble our 1.5 release which is coming out soon (went beta today IIRC)

[afuna]

That would be terrific! I know that the widget framework for jQuery has WAI-ARIA support, but I don't know how extensive it is in practical use. There's also theming so it's easy to make light-on-dark as well as dark-on-light and the ability to turn off animations entirely, but other things like keyboard navigability or similar, I'm afraid I know nothing about.

Hmm, here are the jQuery demos for testing (I think the widgets column is what you'll be after?)


I used Dojo for one project, a long time ago, but it was a one-off, and I wasn't looking at it with an eye towards accessibility -- I'm just about to start looking through the links that ktiedt provided to learn more.

Anyway, I'm really interested to see how both of these stack up, and whether either is a clear winner, or whether it could go either way, and if we could get real world information that would be fantastic.

[denise]

It's totally not my call, but I wanted to make it known as a possibility, given the accessibility features and the fact that ktiedt is so interested in providing help and mentoring!

[jadelennox]

Fu, just making sure I don't forget this information about jQuery and accessibility:

Just to add to the discussion of jQuery - the core library is pretty good vis-Ã -vis ARIA enhancement, and AOL recently contracted with TPG
(http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=566) to review and improve jQuery UI
to fill in any missing holes. This will be a huge accessibility boost to
jQuery. Adding third-party modules/plug-in scripts to jQuery might require
an assessment to see if the developer added ARIA attributes, but I am
feeling very confident that the base library will be extremely good in
short order.