Contribute to the DSpace Development Fund

The newly established DSpace Development Fund supports the development of new features prioritized by DSpace Governance. For a list of planned features see the fund wiki page.

  • Created by Unknown User (wiki_transfer), last modified on Apr 02, 2010

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BACKGROUND

To ensure that the DSpace user interface meets XHTML 1.0 and WAI (web accessibility) compliance level AA (priority 2) standards.

WAI - Web accessibility means that all information and
services on a Web site are accessible to and usable by
everyone, regardless of physical, sensory or cognitive
disabilities, and/or the browsing device or assistive
technology being used.

XHTML

  • Cleaner, more logical markup
  • Increased interoperability
  • Greater accessibility

PROJECT STATUS

Released patch for both Dspace 1.3 Alpha1 and Dspace 1.3 Beta1. Claudia Jurgen tested the latest patch and noticed a number of XHTML/WAI non-conformances. I will be updating the patch in an attempt to resolve all outstanding issues.

BASIC GUIDELINES

For XHTML compliance
– Documents must be well-formed
– Element and attribute names must be in
lower case
– For non-empty elements, end tags are
required
– Attribute values must always be quoted
– For empty elements, end tags are required or
the start tag must end with />
– The id attribute must be used when defining
fragment identifiers on the elements a, applet, form,
frame, iframe, img and map.

Further information on how to write XHTML is available
from http://www.w3c.org/TR/xhtml1/ including guidelines
on HTML 4.0 compatibility.

For WAI compliance
Web accessibility is graded using a priority scheme
determined by the W3C working group there are 3 levels
of conformity:

The WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative), have created a
set of guidelines for making web content accessible to
people with disabilities. These guidelines are available
from: http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990505/

also available are checklists which can be used to make
sure that your content adheres to the priority level you
require (in this case AA as a minimum): http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/full-checklist.html

and techniques to help you to satisfy the requirements
defined in the “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines”: http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT-TECHS/

Naming conventions

Generalised identifiers have been used to allow each
community to customise the forms and tables in their
own way if required.

Headers of all data tables are given an id of “t1”, “t2”, “t3”
etc., in sequence depending on the number of headers
in each table. These ids are then used to link the
relevant fields in the table structure to the correct
headers.

For example:

<table width=”100%” border=”0” title=”Example for
headers”>
<tr>
<th id=”t1”>Header 1</th>
<th id=”t2”>Header 2</th>
<th id=”t3”>Header 3</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td headers=”t1”>Cell 1 linked to header 1 and
id=t1</td>
<td headers=”t2”>Cell 2 linked to header 2 and
id=t2</td>
<td headers=”t3”>Cell 3 linked to header 3 and
id=t3</td>
</tr>
</table>

Form elements have been given an id of the field name
with 't' inserted before, along with a name attribute to
allow the <label> tag to be used on all form labels.

For example:

<form method=”get” action=””>
<label for=”tlabel”>Label</label>

<select name=”label” id=”tlabel”>
<option value=”label1”>Label 1</option>
<option value=”label2”>Label 2</option>
</select>
</form>

For more information of the techniques needed for
creating accessible HTML please see:

http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/

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