Bulletin board accessibility - still looking

Tuesday, December 12th, 2006

In my last post I identified Vanilla as a strong candidate for the basis for an accessible forum. Sadly after several days fruitless work I’ve had to finally reject it for three reasons:

  1. It’s rather immature. The core lacks features. To get features common to most forums such as email notifications you have to load poorly documented extensions of variable quality.
  2. The default HTML is poorly structured. The author has rejected using tables in favour of using lists, which only makes sense when the data is naturally list-like. Many of the lists generated by his code make no sense when read as unstyled text.
  3. The code relies on AJAX, which currently cannot be considered accessible, as a recent very thorough article shows. To overcome this would require writing a fair amount of new code.

Consequently, I am still looking for a forum package that can be readily made accessible.

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One Response to “Bulletin board accessibility - still looking”

  1. likemind journal » Blog Archive » Building an accessible forum Says:

    [...] search Articles from our journal « IE conditional comments - the problem is the solution Bulletin board accessibility - still looking » [...]

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