CSC 321.01, Class 10: Extending your Rails application (1)

Overview

• Preliminaries
  • Notes and news
  • Upcoming work
  • Questions
• Accessibility
• Important Web technologies and their roles
• Lab time

News / Etc.

• Food!
• Warning! Friday the 13th falls on a Monday this month.
• I’m working on getting some grading done. Soon!

Upcoming work

• Hartl, Chapter 6 due Wednesday. (Do as much as you can within your time box.)
• Reading Journal due Wednesday.

Good things to do

Nope, no extra credit.

• CS Table, Tuesday, 14 Feb 2017, noon: Slots, Whales, Etc.
• Thursday extras, Thursday, 16 Feb 2017, 4:15 p.m., Science 3821: 4-1 Program with UIowa.
• Senior day for basketball on Saturday.
• Swimming and diving this weekend.
• Orchestra Saturday.

Questions

Accessibility

• Responsibility to make our sites accessible to people who do not have the same abilities or resources as we do.
  • Limited vision
  • Limited mobility
  • Different languge skills
• As an institution of higher education, we have a legal responsibility to make our sites accessible.
• We also have a moral responsibility to make educational materials accessible.
• Three minutes to chat or Web search or both.
• Note: Lots of people in FOSS communities talk about a11y and i18n. (accessibility and internationalization)
• Note: Sam left out other issues, some of which may be applicable to our projects.
  • Limited Internet access (or technology access)
  • Limited technical skills
• Caption videos. (Manually!)
  • Narrate/describe videos.
• Use multiple languages / let the user choose.
  • Make it easy to choose / set.
• Make sure that colors contrast, both for the color blind and those with less good eyesight.
  • There are tools that let you check your Website as viewed by those with different color vision.
• Think about physical setup.
• Google says to use the Bootstrap accessibility plugin
• How do you support the illiterate?
  • Explanatory images
  • Ask them to have screen readers (how do you support them?)
• Design of screen readers.
• Clear text for “click here”. E.g., “Our help page”
  • And think about when you might be repeated text.
• Provide good alt text for all of your images.
• Low requirements. Don’t expect them to have good graphics cards to load your site.
• Try to limit what is downloaded.
  • There’s a reason we use uglify.
• Use sensible markup that we hope that screen readers can support.
• Add “skip to text” if you have a large nav section.
• Use a toolkit like Bootstrap will make sure that you work on a wide range of browsers.

Important Web technologies and their roles

• HTML/HTML5 - Describes the content of pages.
• Markdown - Simplified Markup.
• CSS - Describe the appearance of pages.
• Javascript - Add interactivity to Web pages.
• JSON and XML - Common data formats.
• HTTP - The protocol used to send information back and forth.
• erb and haml - Extended markup languages that let you put Ruby in the middle of the page.
• DOM - Document object model: How we typically represent a Web page within a Javascript program.
• Plugins like Adobe Flash and Oracle Java.
  • Do people really still use Flash? Yes. Large numbers of Amazon apps, as well as many other things.

Lab time

Work on Hartl 5 or Hartl 6 or both.