Page 1 of 1

Suggestions/non-content contributions

PostPosted: August 16th, 2010, 6:03 pm
by calvin
Hi, I'm a graphic designer and web developer by trade, and I was wondering if FSI is accepting IT volunteers for the FSI Language Courses site.

I came upon this site in an IRC channel for learning foreign languages, and I've been running through the course materials to teach myself German, and it has been a tremendously helpful free resource. But I think there are ways to make the site even more useful by making it more user-friendly.

For example:
  • If the program pages (e.g. German Programmed Introduction Course) each had a link to a torrent file containing that entire program (student text + audio lessons), users could download all the course materials at once. Alternately, they could use the same torrent to download the lessons one by one, still reducing the traffic load on the FSI server.
  • An RSS feed of the news updates would let users know when new content has been added (or when existing content has been updated/revised).
  • Better compliance with accessibility guidelines would make the site easier to navigate with screen readers.
  • The current site is vulnerable to XSS attacks due to the direct display of unsanitized user input; though this is more of a security concern than a usability issue.

Personally, I'm not visually impaired, but I do have a screen reader (NVDA) installed on my computer to test my sites with. And while it can be a bit time consuming to follow all of the accessibility guidelines, by employing proper use of CSS and semantic HTML (which also make the site more maintainable in the long run), you can greatly increase the accessibility of your site without requiring too much effort.

For example, right now the use of a table-based layout on the site really screws with the screen reader and makes navigation more difficult. This could easily be remedied by using a div-based CSS layout.

Secondly, HTML's own shortcomings make it impossible for browsers and screen readers to determine what is content and what is navigation. That is why, for accessibility reasons, it is recommended that you place your navigation links after your main content so that those using screen readers or CLI browsers like Lynx don't need to read the navigation links every time they load a page. (The current use of a table instead of a bullet list for the navigation menu compounds this problem.)

I don't want the web admins to think I'm ragging on them. Truth be told, most sites don't follow these basic accessibility guidelines, and the site that I'm responsible for at work does not place content before navigation either (as a stop gap measure, I've placed a hidden "skip to content" link at the top of each page, but this doesn't work in all screen readers, including NVDA). But that is why raising awareness about web content accessibility is so important.

Anyway, I think the FSI Language Courses are a great idea, and I just want to help in any way possible.

Re: Suggestions/non-content contributions

PostPosted: August 21st, 2010, 5:22 pm
by liddytime2
Try PM-ing vagabond pilgrim!