[mb-users] A Call For Feedback - "StructuredXHTML" branch

[Frederic Da Vitoria]

2007/7/11, Oliver Charles <oliver.g.charles at googlemail.com>:
> Hello everyone!
>
> A quick overview for those who aren't familiar with my branch. I originally
> planned to submit a couple of patches to make some pages of MusicBrainz
> validate, because they had some little bugs like an image tag without an alt
> attribute, but as I looked through the code I felt the HTML structure could
> be a LOT better. So, I started work hacking away, and got my own branch to
> work in, and have been working away for a while on this now.
>
> I'm going for a general 1:1 copy of the site, but also making sure it is as
> fluid as possible. By this, I mean that if I increase the text size a lot,
> the layout should still hold together, which helps make the site more
> accesible to users, maybe those hard of sight - and I've also tried to make
> sure that it's as accessible as possible to screen readers (but this still
> needs more work).
>
> After some discussions with luks, he suggested that I should work in smaller
> chunks, and merging them into the trunk as I go, rather than re-formatting
> the entire site with one massive commit, that wouldn't be merged cleanly.
>
> As such, I'm looking for some feedback from everyone! I've including some
> links to pages that I've reworked below, and if you could visit them and let
> me know any bugs or ideas for improvement, I'd really appreciate it. Stuff
> I'm interesting to hear are things like... font sizes too small in some
> places, colors make text unreadable, any layout bugs, etc.
>
> Please include details of your browser and it's version, and then I can do
> my best to replicate the bug. Feel free to include an image, I'll certainly
> find this helpful :)
>
> Without furthor ado, the pages I've have reworked:
>
> http://musical.raccoonz.net - The main homepage, should let you get an idea
> of what the new site will look like (not much different)
> http://musical.raccoonz.net/search.html - The search portal
> http://musical.raccoonz.net/search/external.html - External
> searches
> http://musical.raccoonz.net/browseartists.html - Browse
> artists (please try edge cases, such as the last page. I did have some bugs
> with this earlier!)
> http://musical.raccoonz.net/browsevarious.html - Browse
> releases
> http://musical.raccoonz.net/browselabels.html - Browse
> labels
>
> Not much so far, but if I could get feedback on these, and get as many
> people to agree on them as possible, I can get the bugs down, and start
> merging it into the trunk when we're ready :) I'm around in IRC most of the
> time, so if you wanted to talk with me and get me to mock some ideas up, etc
> - I'm there!
>
>
> Thanks for reading, I'll shut up now :)
> - Ollie / aCiD2
>
> Oh, and a final note - while the website should stay up, it may occasionally
> have database connection problems, as my database runs on a little server
> setup in my bedroom wardrobe... But keep trying, it should come back up
> eventually.

Hello

I notice you increased the size of a few fonts, well at least for the menu.

The most obvious problem I see is the colour for links. That pale blue
really strains my eyes, so for someone with a real visual problem... I
understand it is part of MB's visual style, but at least an option to
make links contrast more readable would be nice. (Using FireFox
2.0.0.4). Of course there is a similar issue in the search boxes in
the left bar (worse actually, since italics are famous for being
difficult to read, even OCR have problems with them!), but I feel it
is less important here because there are only four of them and it
should be pretty easy to memorize them for someone visually impaired.

There is a tiny problem with the tab order for the letters. It would
be much more intuitive if the tab went from A to B... instead of from
A to N then to B... remember many people with visual problems do
something like tabulating through the different parts of the page. The
Browse Release page doesn't have this issue.

The top menu is completely unusable without a mouse, but as long as
all the pages can be reached through normal links (even if it means
going through several intermediate pages), I guess there is no way to
avoid it.

All in all, I did not notice much differences, which is nice too,
nobody will feel lost!

-- 
Frederic Da Vitoria