usability

I've transferred this discussion from the forums at http://drupal.org/node/572734, where it had died a death. Here's what I wrote there. Any thoughts?

Following all of the stuff at Drupalcon Paris about Drupal moving from a service to a product that is friendly for end users, I was having a discussion with a friend of mine who has used Drupal in the past. He isn't a developer or coder but he's not non-technical, either.

There has been a lot of informal talk about Drupal’s issue queue. For designers and non-technical people, it can be a confusing place. And while there has also been some talk about creating a separate place to discuss design-related issues (for example), the simple fact is: the issue queue is where developers get informed about problems and requests and that’s the place where they organize the work that they do. If non-developers want to improve the code, they have to use the issue queue.

Preview functionality is known feature of many publishing systems: it's intended to show exactly how your content will look like before publishing. With nodes displayed in Panel Pages there is issue that panel layout can be quite complex, and sometimes you can't have same display in Panel Page and in preview (without spending too much effort). Basically, to have same display one would have to code that complex layout in node template too, in addition to Panel lauout template, or have some way to render Panel display in preview.
How do you solve that problem ?
Is it possible to render Panel page in preview in place of node template ?

Next Conference Call

Monday August 24
11:00am Eastern Time (U.S.) (-05:00 UTC)

If you want to participate please e-mail
everett@openconcept.ca

Agenda

Please feel free to add agenda items.

• Discuss solutions to outstanding problems listed in Everett's blog article Update to the State of Drupal 7 Accessibility.

Participants

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On Monday, August 10, we had the second of three planned Drupal 7 accessibility taskforce conference calls. The goal of this call was to discuss open accessibility issues, and to brainstorm and build consensus on appropriate solutions.

Present on the Call

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Hi folks,

I'm posting this because it's so solvable and yet it causes so much grief.

Try to imagine you've never worked with Views before, and you're pretty daring about trying out new software. Like most of us, you're likely to start throwing things around before you've finished reading the documentation.

You go to /admin/build/views and see "storage" "type" "tag" with no explanation. You do see a list of views, and you decide to try playing with one of them to see what happens, so you click on the "edit" link.

This morning I took a first look at the d7ux administration theme "Seven" from the perspective of a screen-reader user. Overall I found the theme enjoyable, but there is more work to be done to ensure that the theme is truly accessible.

You can read my blog post about the accessibility of Seven at http://openconcept.ca/blog/everett/first_glance_accessibility_evaluation...

On Monday, July 27, we had the first of three planned Drupal 7 accessibility taskforce conference calls. The goal of the call was for those interested in Drupal 7 accessibility to be introduced to each other, and to develop consensus on several fundamental issues surrounding Drupal 7 accessibility

Present on the Call

• Mike Gifford
• Everett Zufelt
• Katherine Lynch
• Brandon Bowersox
• William Lawrence
• Kathy Kahl
• Ann McMeekin
• Valeria Brigatti
• Owen Barton

Apologies

Hi everybody,

a few days ago I spotted a very nice idea from the user hunvreus, who worked out a nice method to beautify drupal forms.
He describes this as a basic idea which has to be improved more:

The popup script works fine but need a bit of customization to take textareas, radios and checkboxes into account, the behavior could be improved to take the field focus into account, the style of the popup could be improved as well...