Although several of the projects served by Read the Docs have to do with accessibility, I can't find anything that discusses accessibility guidelines and support for the project as a whole. What resources can folks suggest?
Most projects that involve accessibility tend to follow the guidelines defined by the WCAG. Most laws about accessibility compliance tend to point to meeting a specific level of the WCAG.
This is useful for finding out about the requirements, but to learn more about accessibility, you can find a number of resources online with a simple google search. Personally, I've found a good site for introducing people to accessibility is Webaim,
There's an excellent accessibility recommendations site that covers web, mobile (iOS + android) and editorial contents (office, pdf...).
Whatever your field of development, many useful information is well detailed and some code snippets with illustrations are available to perfectly explain some concepts.
Related
This is my first post on here so I might not have the lingo down, go easy on me!
I've been doing a lot of personal research into website accessibility over the past few months and I've gotten a pretty good grasp of by now. There are lots of resources in that department. I can't seem to find any good resources on accessibility in the context of mobile app development be it Android, iOS, or windows.
Tl;Dr: anyone know good resources to learn accessibility in Mobile app development?
General accessibility is covered by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Most of the principals can be applied to mobile applications too.
You should also see "Mobile Accessibility: How WCAG 2.0 and Other W3C/WAI Guidelines Apply to Mobile"
This may appear as a subjective question but i am asking from an technical architect point of view.
What would be your choice if you were building E-Commerce based Application to help giant companies carry out their marketing and sales campaigns. I looked into open source frameworks such as Magento that works with ZendFramework using the PHP,MySQL And Apache stack. Other basic frameworks like OSCommerce seem reasonable. Whats the leading E-Commerce framework for .Net Technologies? I also looked into Zoho and it seems like using their applications most of the requirements can be knocked off but I also feel I may face flexibility issues down the line with what they provide.
Please try to mention what architectural benefits do you see in the frameworks you know about. Thanks, as always, and its always great to hear the expert opinions on stackoverflow.
For "Giant companies" your question is formed badly and has no information to actually answer it.
For micro and middle sized companies (10 -500 persons in company) go for Magento EE or Magneto CE version and Magento optimized hosting solution
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Closed 10 years ago.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of coding your own blogging engine from scratch, versus using an already existing engine (for example, but not necessarily, wordpress)?
The biggest reason for going with developed blogging applications today is
probably interoperability. Seasoned blogging applications of today include
plug-ins and fundamental development inertia that ensures that you will interface well
with things like Twitter, Flickr, and social networking sites. Only a
spectacular developer (with a lot of time) would be able to custom code a
solution for all the APIs and other bells and whistles that, in the course of a blog's lifetime, they will want to use or at least experiment with. To build a custom blogging application is to make its default state a basically isolated one. And isolation for many blogs doesn't work.
The biggest plus for using a custom blogging application anyway is that you retain a high degree of control over the application's core behavior, and, since you will likely host it on your own server, direct access to its statistical metrics. If you know well ahead of time that you will not care about interoperability beyond, say RSS, or one or 2 other channels, and have the time to invest in core development, a custom blog is a great way to maintain a look and feel that will positively startle visitors who are used to a constant WordPress or Blogspot layout. One major pitfall, it seems, is that off the shelf blogging applications require you to learn how to manipulate each of their various presentations. It's not hard if you want to simply adopt any thousands of "themes" that typically exist for them, but then, your presentation will not be unique. Sooner or later a visitor to your blog will encounter the same look and feel elsewhere, exactly. The solution there is to hire a custom developer but that of course costs $$$. Even if YOU are that developer who will wind up trading coding-for-core-functionality time, for learning and coding for presentational individuality. Expensive either way.
I am struggling with this question myself. As a proponent of "everything independent" on the web I hate the idea of giving up low level control of my blog. I've been online since the consumer web first took off and understand the ease by which a website can be created using nothing but notepad and an FTP client. To me, anything beyond these basic tools is very "AOLish", and yet, many blogging applications have now evolved into full content management frameworks that would rival the complexity of mastering that which it once took just to figure out basic HTML. I've finally taken to in-depth experimentation with some of the more popular blogging solutions (WordPress, Blogger), and am shocked to find out that after spending so much time maintaining my own solutions, how quickly (and much better) it is to compose and manage entries with them. Since most of my blogs are not profit projects, time to compose has not been a factor for me. However, this may change. If it comes down to where I need to manage and concern myself more with content than mechanics to get my messages out, I will probably swing to seasoned blogging app mode and hope I learn enough about my platform to make it truly a unique experience anyway. That would probably be the best outcome for anyone like us debating this.
Dave
I just set up my own blog and I had to answer this same question myself. Here are the main reasons I went with BlogEngine.Net
Coding the entire thing myself would have taken a long time
I saw that there were a lot of themes available (and that making/modifying themes is easy)
Why reinvent the wheel? (would you write something that the public engines don't already do?)
Advantages of writing your own
It's fun
You might learn new programming tricks or techniques
Using a software you wrote is more satisfying than using someone else's
It will be exactly as you want it
Disadvantages
It takes time
Security risks. A high profile open source engine such as Wordpress is less likely to have security vulnerabilities than your own, especially if you don't have experience in web development. (However there are many high profile programs full of vulnerabilities, such as the widely used Internet Explorer), so take this with a grain of salt.
Features. Wordpress/others will probably have more features (even though some people don't like software with too many features)
You must keep improving your engine over time. If you stop but decide to keep blogging, you will probably want to move to Wordpress, especially if some features you really want aren't implemented yet in yours. This can be problematic, especially if you didn't plan export features.
Actually I went through this path.
For fun and learning reasons I coded my own little content-management system which I used for rudimentary blogging. It had quite static content (no comments were allowed) but it was enough for me. One year later I decided to switch to wordpress and am really happy with it.
Today I would change my approach and would go for wordpress instantly.
Reasons from product perspective:
You won't be able to feature-compete with wordpress (including plugins)
You won't be able to have such a stable and secure app as wordpress
Responsive community (both documentation and patches)
Continous releases
Reasons from learning perspective:
You learn a lot by understanding and reading other's source code.
You can make the product better instead of reinventing the wheel (by providing own plugins or bug-fixes).
It is a far more realistic job-setup: You hardly build apps from scratch but rather extend, integrate and maintain them. Also you work in a team.
Nowadays I would start to build 'from-scatch' software only if:
There is no software which can suit you or you can't extend to your needs.
You need a custom software for business reasons (e.g. you are a startup with fresh ideas)
Building a new software is cheaper as maintaining/extending existing one
I work in a shop that is mostly .NET based, and we're trying to pick out a content management system to use. This means we mostly likely won't be able to use any of the common open source CMS projects (Plone, phpNuke, anthing not based on .NET, etc.).
Since I'm a huge usability nerd (just finished reading The Design of Everyday Things by Norman), I've been looking at them from that point of view. Frankly, I haven't been too impressed. This quote sums it up:
Most open source content management software is useless. The only thing worse is every commercial CMS I’ve used. - Jeffrey Veen
Here's a short list of our requirements:
Has to be .NET based
Prefer open source or on the inexpensive side
Limited feature set (we don't need too many features and they make things harder to use)
Does need Active Directory integration and robust permissions
Should be focused on web standards and usability
I know it's probably an impossible feature list, but are there any content management systems that kinda sorta look like they might not suck more than a Dyson?
Edit:
Here's the current situation:
I'm going to push for N2. I've got Active Directory integration working well (I even wrote a custom role provider). The only thing missing is workflow functionality. Hopefully I can get something going with that since it's the last sticking point. The N2Contrib project might provide a starting point if I can figure it out.
I would still love to check out Stencil CMS if/when it gets off the ground.
One of my co-workers was trying to get Umbraco going but wasn't having much luck.
Thanks for the help!
Self-plug is lame, but what you're describing is pretty much exactly what I am getting ready to release for $79 a pop. If you're still looking in a few weeks, take a peek. If you'd like, shoot me an email (rex#stencilcms.com).
I've heard both positive and negative feedback about Umbraco. A lot of people like Graffiti, but it's more blog-oriented than a full-blown CMS.
Check out N2 (http://n2cms.com/). I think that it covers most, if not all, of your requirements (I don't think it has Active Directory capability at this time). We are using N2 and I have really enjoyed how flexible it has been.
My company just completed a review of several commercial .NET-based CMS/portal platforms and, while I can't reveal who was in them (thanks, NDAs!), I can tell you that IMO they all sucked very, very badly.
Good luck on your search. I'll keep an eye on this thread in the hopes that there's something we missed.
We had a similar set of requirements and chose Telerik Sitefinity. It's got it's faults but overall I've been happy with it so far.
Unfortunately Jeffery speaks the truth. Which is probably why I build a new custom cms from the ground up every few years. Basically, the motivation for "boxed" CMS packages is to have every feature on earth and be everything to everyone and therefore do nothing particularly well for anyone. With the feature bloat comes the usability nightmares. Unless you start customizing and then you usually end up forking the project and losing the advantage of community updates.
Kentico CMS according your list:
Has to be .NET based
It's .net based, .NET Framework 2.0 or later
Prefer open source or on the inexpensive side
Free edition which can be used for commercial purposes is available, paid license starts at $750, source code is an option
Limited feature set (we don't need too many features and they make things harder to use)
Many built-in modules/features, anyway they can be easily disabled to keep the UI simple to use
Does need Active Directory integration and robust permissions
AD, Forms and Live Id! Integration
Should be focused on web standards and usability
UTF-8 Support including RTL languages, WAI Compliant, XHTML Compliant, XML, XHTML, HTML, XSLT, CSS.
Instant on-line demo or download available at:
http://www.kentico.com/Download.aspx
I am looking for some examples of innovative uses of social networking for a purely commercial environment. I can see the uses that Twitter might have for micro blogging for anything (application event logs springs to mind amongst other ideas).
Does anyone have any further examples or ideas they may want to share for ways that we can embed this kind of technology in our infrastructure.
For reference we are are an organisation which uses primarliy Microsoft technology (SharePoint, VS 2008, ASP.Net etc.).
Feel free to reference specific code examples, tutorials or just to make subjective comments on the concept of Social Networking for the business environment.
Sites currently being looked at include: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Maps.
GREAT EXAMPLE here http://brandonhallawards.com/08/958-BLOGS-Sun.doc
by the way, are there any others?
I am also interested.
- Echo
With a little effort, you may use Captcha for Air Force recruiting instead of these old-fashioned color blind cards.
You can even do it online!
Don't forget the very common practice to use IM in corporate settings. It's often much easier than phone or mail, even if it is often not allowed by the IT security staff. Granted, it may not be truly innovative but the subversive factor counts, IMHO.