Fluid work update

[Colin Clark]

Hi everyone,

It's nice to see the discussion on the list getting more concrete and 
in-depth as we start to make progress on the Lightbox component.

> Good question.  Should the Fluid project align with supported browsers 
> for Sakai, uPortal and Moodle or should we define our own?  It seems 
> like we should at least support those that the projects already 
> support.  Are there browsers far behind the curve from an accessibility 
> perspective that would be too challenging to support at this point?  

I think we need to take a look at the supported browsers for the range 
of technologies we're using and also balance that with our own 
requirements. I'm thinking we should create a little matrix in the wiki 
that lists the supported browsers for the following:

Participating projects:
Sakai
uPortal
Moodle

JavaScript toolkits:
Dojo
YUI
others (Prototype/Scriptaculous, JQuery, etc.)

Does anyone have some free time to look into this and compile a list?

> This is a great idea.  If we think of this as organic we could create it 
> as we go and allow it to be Fluid :) as we define the styles.  I can add 
> a page in the wiki under user experience.  Should we combine 
> accessibility, visual and interaction guidelines or have a seperate page 
> for each?  Can you point us to good accessibility style guides you've 
> seen for a benchmark?

I agree that it makes sense to outline a structure for the style guide 
and then let it start to grow a bit in the wiki. Hopefully Rich can give 
us a sense of the structure and content of the W3C accessibility style 
guide.

Mike or Clayton, have you seen other examples that might be worth having 
a look at? Anyone else have suggestions?

> Exactly, the work of defining these still needs to be done.  And we are 
> really looking to those in the community with expertise in this area to 
> help with the definition.  At the moment I think we are a bit caught up 
> trying to get some "quick wins" (as Colin discussed in the roadmap) 
> while fleshing out some of the long term goals...and still hiring new 
> resources that Fluid allows for.   Perhaps this would be a good topic 
> for an upcoming Fluid meeting...or a breakout working session in an 
> upcoming Fluid meeting?

I'd be happy to put this on the agenda for the face-to-face meeting in 
Amsterdam if you're interested in talking more about it then.

> This is great.  I'm looking forward to further conversations to define 
> and flesh out these specifications.  So we decided to start Lightbox 
> design and development within the contexts of default "drag and drop" 
> behavior and keyboard-only behavior.  I'm interested in how others see 
> the low vision needs coming into play.  Is this yet another property 
> setting on the component or is this work that would be done in the 
> Gallery tool itself?  IMHO -- these are exactly the kinds of 
> conversations we need to be having as we further define what a component 
> is and isn't.

The plan currently is to move the responsibility for laying out images 
from the Image Gallery tool into the Lightbox component. Given that most 
of the layout is done using CSS, it's not a major change.

My sense is that magnification and linearization will be properties of 
the component itself. After we've got the basic image organization 
functionality built, it will be really interesting to do the work to 
ensure that the Lightbox supports screen magnification and other use cases.

Colin

-- 
Colin Clark
Technical Lead, Fluid Project
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto
http://fluidproject.org