Webmasters' Guild
From Library
The Webmasters' Guild was initially formed several years ago to provide a means for those individuals within state and local government that have responsibilities for their agencies Web Sites to share ideas, issues, problems, etc. This remains the purpose of this group. The Guild has monthly meetings between September and June of each year, usually on the first Friday of the month from 9 am to noon. The meetings are dedicated to a single topic of interest to the group along with "mini-sessions" as scheduled covering assorted topics of interest. The meetings generally either feature a speaker with expertise in the area and/or Guild Members with experiences in this area.
2008-2009 Meetings
Full details on past and future meetings can be found on the NYS Forum's Web site at http://www.nysforum.org/committees/webmastersguild/. Listed below are the main topics for meetings already held or finalized and proposed topics for meetings in development:
- October 3, 2008 (Empire State Plaza, Meeting Rooms 2&3): PDF Accessiblity
- November 7, 2008 (Empire State Plaza, Meeting Rooms 2&3): Web Graphics
- December 5, 2008 (Crowne Plaza, Pearl Street Room,): Website Usability
Remaining meetings are scheduled for:
- February 6, 2009 (NYS Museum Theatre)
- March 6, 2009 (NYS Museum Theatre)
- April 3, 2009 (Crowne Plaza, Ballroom A): Open Mic
- May 1, 2009 (NYS Museum Theater): Project Management for Webmasters
- June 5, 2009 (Empire State Plaza, Meeting Rooms 2&3): eLearning
Potential Topics for 2009-1010 meetings include:
- Designing for Cross-Browser Compatibility and Mobile Devices
- Web Services and XML
- Security Issues with Web Sites and Web Apps
- Wikis and Blogs in Government Settings
- Webstats to Improve effectiveness/performance
Proposed Mini-Session Topics
Scalable images: Converting pixels to ems
I am currently experimenting with ems to size images. I think I am being mostly successful but I would like to learn to use a tried and true formula for converting pixels to ems. It works like a charm with fonts but not with images. It's truly a pain... Maybe you can find someone to give a mini-session on this? I would like to truly understand how to do it we designed the site using ems so it’s totally scalable (there are a few things I’m still cleaning up) so I don't want to use pixels for the images.
Ruby
I recently read an article about how RUBY is becomming an increasingly popular web scripting language that is maturing may be overtaking PHP as the opensource scripting language of choice. It would be an interesting topic for a meeting or mini-session.
Web-based Training
My colleague and I were discussing a Project that she is assigned to, figuring out how we take advantage of computer technologies to advance our agency's training goals. I mentioned to her that I wasn't sure if Training technologies is one of the Forum's areas of interests. We agreed that we are not aware of any coordinated effort in this area, similar to the Web Guild, to advance this very important field. As state budgets get smaller and smaller, the impact in Agencies are felt in many different ways.
For example for us it means that we have to figure out ways to deliver interactive, compelling training online, not just "page turners". That's expensive, unless we can benefit from "free" resources that may already be out there -we just don't know where they are. I know from experience how invaluable that is, because if it had not been for the support of the Guild, we would not have been able to do what we've done with our Web site. There is a link between Technology Training and Web Technologies. Would the Forum and the Guild be interested in finding out how to develop resources to help agencies during these hard times?
Content Management Thread
CommonSpot
The DMV uses a CMS (CommonSpot) for its intranet site; it does not use CMS at this time for its Internet site. CommonSpot is from PaperThin in Quincy, MA ( http://www.paperthin.com/ ). This CMS is written in ColdFusion and is browser-based. No ColdFusion knowledge—or even HTML skill, for that matter—is required to use CommonSpot to create and maintain web pages. However, there are some benefits for developers who know either HTML or ColdFusion. The DMV webmasters who use CommonSpot to maintain their offices’ sites (Audit, Finance, IT, Legal, Operations, Personnel, Safety Programs Analysis, etc.) are mainly non-technical people who have “webmaster” responsibilities as one of several roles in their job description.
Ektron
Has anyone had experience using products or services offered by Ektron?
http://www.ektron.com/index.aspx
In the future, we hope to make our Intranet more interactive, and are beginning research into this goal, including Ektron's eIntranet offering.
When evaluating web CMS products Ektron made it to our short list. Ultimately we did not choose Ektron because at the time they did not natively support xml. It looked like a fine product otherwise. New York State Insurance Fund
I looked at Ektron when we looked at doing a WCM system for our intranet. We demoed one of their early WCM systems called 'eMPower', but it just didn't work for us. We ended up with a different product.
Email: HTML vs. Plain Text Thread
My agency is exploring the possibility of an e-mail based newsletter to be sent to a very diverse group of government agencies and community-based organizations. We have not decided yet between these three formats: pdf, with the well known accessibility, space issues, etc; html with it’s own issues, plain-text vanilla that will might not look very appealing but would be most accessible to most people. I was inclined to recommend accessible html format until I spoke with Debi Orton. I also read this article by Jeffrey Zeldman, http://www.zeldman.com/2007/06/08/e-mail-is-not-a-platform-for-design/ and have serious doubts about html for these purposes but I read an article at WebAim on the benefits of html formatting http://www.webaim.org/articles/archives/email/#html.
At the link that follows, you will find two basic HTML approaches used by one program area of the State Education Department: one provides a simple, single page of news in a memo format, and another mimics a magazine format in that you page from article to article. In both cases, I think we e-mailed links to those "newsletters" to our target audience; I believe we also ran the HTML pages against standard accessibility software.
Link: http://www.highered.nysed.gov/he_newsletter.html (See the "Periodic Updates from..." section)
Have you considered using a multipart/alternative MIME type to send the same content in both text/plain and text/html formats, leaving it to the user’s preferences to determine the final output?
I’d be interested to hear the pros/cons of pdf newsletters myself.
Jeffrey Zeldman also wrote this: http://www.zeldman.com/2007/06/12/eight-points-for-better-e-mail-relationships/
HTML e-mails definitely bring their own challenges, but would still get my vote. Just keep it simple.
Yes, HTML is fine, just keep it simple, think HTML 1.0 (Heading tags, paragraph tags, lists - get nutty and add a logo). Stay away from highly formatted HTML.
Web Hosting Services Thread
I was curious if anyone would want to share with me who their agency is hosted by and if they feel they are satisfied with their host. We currently have a host but are just wondering what else is out there and the differences there might be between host. Any information would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
The DMV content that is hosted outside its firewall is on a dedicated server maintained by Logical Net. Considering a variety of factors—uptime, billing, logs, technical support, customization, responsiveness/communications—our experience over the past 5-6 years earn this vendor between 8-9 on a scale of 10. Their most positive quality: reliability. Most annoying trait: lost statistics or problems accessing stats 15%-20% of the time.
Organization Charts on Web Thread
Hi we’re trying to set up an org chart on our Intranet here at DCJS. It will be done with static content, not database driven.
Is there a good template that can be used to accomplish this? I'm looking around Google and can’t seem to find anything that’s free that will work for a basic org chart.
It needs to have clickable headings to go to the next layer of the org chart on another page. I don’t want to use images if I don’t have to and that’s what Visio wants to do when I “save as webpage..”
We are looking for something similar but with the ability to have the users maintain their own info with a login that ties into their LDAP account.
Forbes did somthing for anyone to update info on public companies that is pretty good but I don't think they open sourced the code. Check it out at: http://orgchart.forbes.com/
Without the use of a database, the best I can suggest is to fill a standard multi-level HTML list and use CSS absolute positioning, borders, and widths on all the <li> tags to arrange them appropriately. With this method, you'd likely have to set a specific pixel height for your text. This isn't as big a no-no as it used to be since most modern browsers now zoom rather than increase text size when people zoom in. The important thing is that the text have a logical flow when viewed without styles which the list will provide. Without the use of images (as you've requested), for the lines connecting the boxes, I suggest absolutely-positioned <div> tags with only a thin, left-hand border.
This is a tough project because you're basically drawing with HTML elements. I guess another method is Tables but that would be extremely messy and wouldn't be very accessible. I used this method for a flowchart once several years ago because we needed a page to load faster. Sometimes getting the lines to align just so can be daunting. Setting a specific height for each "box" will help make things easier, but will also take some time and complicate editing in the future. I suggest making the background-color of the <li> tags white (not clear) and set their z-axis to be higher than the connector lines. That way, if the connector lines won't have to be very precise because the box will overlap them.
Have you considered an XML solution? Users would be able to maintain their own information via read/write operations with whatever server language you're working with. Even if you don't have access to a web development language like ColdFusion, JSP, PHP, or other, you can still attach an XSL file to the XML org representation and serve it directly. Of course this probably violates some accessibility rule. But this way, you only need two files - org.xml and org.xsl. Manual updates to the XML file would be required without a server-side language, but it would still be better than fussing with HTML.
Moreover, should you ever decide to go the database route, you can easily import the data from XML into a database; just write a little XSLT to generate import statements. Continuing, the original XSL from the non database solution can still be used with both structured database data as well as semi-structure XML. Many databases can store XML natively and with some simple xQueries, can generate pretty impressive XML documents.
But then, I'm the nerd who has an XML bumper sticker and thinks XML can solve most of the world's problems. At least give it some consideration.
In the end, it's still just HTML being served. It's maintaining the data that is simplified.
Security Thread
Has anyone had experience using http://www.spybye.org/
Web-based Training (eLearning) Thread
My colleague and I were discussing a Project that she is assigned to, figuring out how we take advantage of computer technologies to advance our agency's training goals. I mentioned to her that I wasn't sure if Training technologies is one of the Forum's areas of interests. We agreed that we are not aware of any coordinated effort in this area, similar to the Web Guild, to advance this very important field. As state budgets get smaller and smaller, the impact in Agencies are felt in many different ways.
For example for us it means that we have to figure out ways to deliver interactive, compelling training online, not just "page turners". That's expensive, unless we can benefit from "free" resources that may already be out there -we just don't know where they are. I know from experience how invaluable that is, because if it had not been for the support of the Guild, we would not have been able to do what we've done with our Web site. There is a link between Technology Training and Web Technologies. Would the Forum and the Guild be interested in finding out how to develop resources to help agencies during these hard times?
NYSDOT Office of Design is investigating options creating e-learning courses and software simulations. We are interested in learning how other state agencies have implemented e-learning software. Specifically, if your agency is using e-learning software, who are the vendors and what services are you using, etc. Conversely, if you are not using e-learning software, how is your agency doing so.
Any information that you can offer would be appreciated.
At the Partnership we have used consultants to write custom e-learning courses for us (SUNY PDP in our case). We have also used Adobe Captivate for short tutorials and software simulations that we have written in-house. We are also exploring the use of OFT's eLearnNY as a simple e-learning authoring tool.
Were you trained in Adobe Captivate? If so, who provided the training? Did you find this software to be difficult to use?
We have used Captivate to provide interactive training videos/simpulations for our school districts in our 4 county area that we support. We used Microknowledge in Albany (near the Albany Airport) for our training. They are extremely professional and knowledgeable and are a great training resource for state agencies. Captivate has a high learning curve, typical of Adobe products, and if you are looking for a training resource, I highly recommend them. We have also used MicroKnowledge for other staff trainings as well.
I would be interested in hearing views on the differences or similarities between Captivate and Camtasia. Do they fulfill the same purpose? Do you need to purchase both depending on your objective?
They do have different strong points – here’s a review that outlines their differences (it’s a bit of an older review, but still helpful): http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=9393. Also, here’s another interesting (and more recent) comparison: http://netsquirrel.com/powerpoint/powerpoint/screencast_smackdown.swf. Personally, I like Captivate best, but I think my needs lean more towards e-learning development. Actually, Troy Web also does training/consulting on Captivate. I would recommend them for help.
Flash Video Player Thread
I'm looking into a free web based flv player for our intranet/internet sites. The default one that comes with flash 8 doesn't give me fullscreen capabilities. Also we're looking for one that could possibly have captioning available.
Flash 9 includes captioning and full screen capability.
We have been working through the same situation (Flash 8) and with a little help from my colleagues at the State Museum we have found a solution. WGBH has created two players, one that you can apply in the Flash application called CC for Flash, and one that you can apply within your web page called ccPlayer. We have been using the second one and have found that it will work with both external and embedded captions, which is useful if you haven't committed to a captioning method yet. Here is the URL for the players: http://ncam.wgbh.org/webaccess/ccforflash/
Video Captions XML Thread
I’m looking for a program that will create xml captions for me as I type.
We use a program called IDS caption, which is free, to add captions to our videos. It only outputs into a .smi format. We need captions in .xml (dfxp.xml) format. This is one of those times that Google fails to impress me as I can’t find anything about it online.
Basically what I want to do is play the file in the program, and while its playing I want to type captions for it, then when I hit enter, or another key combo, have the program automatically insert a timestamp on the next line indicating that it should change the subtitle. Then that created file can be saved as an xml file for use with my embedded flash player
We are currently using Flash 8 Pro and upgrading is NOT an option unfortunately.
Accessible Error Messages Using .NET Thread
I am trying to devise an accessible, usable standard for displaying error messages in web forms that can be used in most situations (see attachment). Using Civil Service’s account creation screen as a starting point, I would like to add error messages within the labels of each field. This makes it easier for regular users to pick out errors without having to go back to the summary.
Using .net’s validation controls, this is a fairly straightforward proposition, except the adding of anchor links to the validation summary is new functionality. Before going to the effort of developing a control that can add these links, I would like to find out if anyone is doing anything similar or knows of a commercially available control that can accomplish this. Any suggestions or comments would be appreciated.
Offsite (External) Links Thread
We at DMV are interested in any state agency web site policies on the use of external links, in particular links to other state agency web sites.
DMV has an "Other State Agency Web Site" section on our site home page for all the links specifically requested by other agencies and or/DMV executive management. However, there has been at least one recent request to the DMV CEO for a banner or graphic link on the DMV site to a program page on the other agency's site. There have been previous requests to link to special program pages on other agency sites (and these go in the "Other State Agency Links" area), but this was the first request to actually post graphics developed by another agency.
Agency management is concerned about the expansion and format of external links on the DMV site, and wants us to develop a written policy. I am seeking input from other agency Web managers as to their policies, whether written or unwritten.
Our philosophy at Civil Service is that people come to our web site to find information, and we want them to find it. We use a special icon to indicate the link leads off-site, but otherwise don't differentiate it in any way from the rest of the content. A good example is our Business Suite, a portal for HR professionals (and trove of good information). You'll see at a glance that four of our top-level links lead off-site:
http://www.cs.state.ny.us/businesssuite/
Since we issue tax-exempt municipal Bonds, our lawyers claim the SEC/IRS/or whomever requires us to disclose that the link is external. . . so here is what happens. When you click an external link we throw up a warning that says:
You Are Now Exiting NYSEFC.ORG
Thank you for visiting NYSEFC.ORG - The Official Web Site of the NYSEFC.
We hope your visit was helpful and informative.
The EFC does not imply approval of the listed destinations, warrant the accuracy of any information set out in those destinations, or endorse any opinions expressed therein. Like NYSEFC.ORG all other web sites operate under the auspices and at the direction of their respective owners, who should be contacted directly with questions regarding the content of these sites.
You will be redirected to the link you selected, assuming that the target server is available.
If you change your mind about leaving our site, you still can access our pages by clicking here
To see it work go here: http://www.nysefc.org/home/index.asp?page=25 and try a link
This would be a good topic for a mting
Blogs Thread
There are a couple of areas on our website where we would like to add the ability for online discussion – perhaps through blogging software, or perhaps some other social networking site. The only thing we are sure that we do NOT want to do is create a link to a facebook page, because I understand that people in other state offices (who may be just the folks we are looking to have participate in these discussions) would not be able to access that.
If you have added this kind of feature to your website, I am interested in finding out what kind of experience – good or bad – you may have had with various programs or formats. I’m new to this – I’m a journalist who is primarily managing web content here, but also venturing gingerly into development – so any thoughts you could share would be most welcome.
Google Analytics / Web Analytics Thread
Has anyone used the feature that allows you to filter out stats from your own Agency so that your reports are more accurate? Any feedback would be appreciated
I'm not sure what you mean exactly, but we're in the process of setting up individual website profiles for sub-directories on our website. Sub-directories are managed by different departmental web page managers, so we give them access to their specific Google Analytics profile, so that they can only see their own statistics.
Analytics Settings > your site > edit > add filter > Filter type Exclude all traffic from an IP address.
you can also choose "exclude all traffic from a domain" which can also be useful for different reasons than IP blocking-
if you view your pages on a dev or qa server, you dont want those hits to count - but you may want hits from your own agency to count when folks in your organization are going to the production site (your own users legitimate hits should "count"? thats up to you) so in this case if you have an (internal) dev server called sunyorangedev and a qa server called test.sunyorange.edu you can add domain filters for these 2 domains so when you hit your pages on these servers the "hits" dont count.
you may also want to add a domain filter for your websites public facing IP address (209.68.16.12). this is especially a good idea when using periodic vulnerability scanning tools which will spider your site and make hundreads of "bogus" requests and form submissions - most of these tools hit your site by IP address (not domain name) so adding a domain filter of 209.68.16.12 will block those requests from getting tracked as well. you may or may not want this, but its something to think about.
the IP address blocking is good too - but you will block all requests from that IP - and keep in mind if you are behind a proxy server and the network folks change the outward facing IP, they dont always let us web folks know about it - so tell them its important that they tell you if it changes otherwise you will start getting some hits you dont want.
Is anyone able to recommend software for tracking web traffic, that is particularly useful in analyzing hits on reports that are pdf files? Google Analytics is OK at doing this, if a visitor gets to the report by way of a link from a page within our website, but not if they find the report through any other method, such as a link directly from a search engine.
Any suggestions? Caveats? Other thoughts?
We use a blended approach to web metrics, Google analytics for Page Tag and Urchin 6 for log file analysis. In this respect, logfile analysis will give you what you want.
Depending on your web server, you should be able to parse the logs and search for the pfd extension. If sessions and session tracking are enabled on your site you could also tell how users got in. All this assuming you have read access to the web server logs and have a basic familiarity of SQL. There are tools out there Splunk is a good one and its free!!!!
DMV uses Nettracker through its web hosting company. It does a smashing job tracking hits on EVERYTHING on your site, but I also understand it is also expensive as a stand-alone tracking tool.
Can anyone tell me if they are using Google Analytics for their Internet or Intranet?
We are using Google Analytics for our public website at SUNY Orange.
I’d also like to ask the intranet part of that question.
Is anyone running it on their internal intranet? Ours is sealed off from the internet, and I know that Google analytics requires that the server it resides on has access to their specific url.
If you have it running what special precautions had to be put in place to make it more secure or anything else that needed to be done. I’m trying to evaluate the possibility of using this free service for tracking intranet usage.
If you have the means, you could determine the resolutions that the visitors to your site are using. Google Analytics or even AWStats could get you this information for free.
Google Analytics is a wonderland of pure delight which, if I were to simply call it "useful", I would be doing it a grave disservice. Also, it will let you know what browsers your users are viewing your site with, so you can determine which browsers (such as IE6) you'll have to create additional stylesheets for.
Step back from the google Koolaide bro. Google has its issues.
While GA is a great tool, it can only track (I believe) 3 “campaigns” at a time. If you are running/tracking many campaigns (each with separate landing pages and their own paths to separate goals), you’ll need something else.
There is also that bit in the Terms of Service that says Google can use your data if they “need” to. http://www.google.com/analytics/tos.html
One shortcoming I can see is that it is so amazing that it could physically paralyze you for hours. :)
Joking aside, you might have some small issues getting it past your security department. It runs a javascript which is owned by Google and located on Google's servers. You basically have to trust Google to have the proper safeguards in place to protect that code from being compromised by a disgruntled employee or incompetent coder. Then again, that's an issue one might argue is endemic of all software, so a moot point. Also, if your audience is a group of people with limited access to the internet, they will need to have the URL that Analytics points to unblocked.
Google Analytics throws a lot of extraneous info into your server log files, I have also monitored our websites and there is a lot of server interaction going on between Google Analytics server and the hosted sites. This activity has tripped security measures put in place in our DMZ. To be sure, they are false positives, though it is interesting that they are triggered nonetheless.
Metrics wise, we use a blended approach, both logfile analysis [Urchin 6] and page tagging [GA] .
Once GA code is implemented you cannot analyze with any other logfile analyzer and expect sound results, you're sort of locked in. You won't know this until you have reviewed the logs, or have had it chew through a years worth of licensed page views in 1 quarter [erroneously].
GA has in the past changed it's processing/analyzing code without notifying end-users, this can only be ascertained by keeping a running spreadsheet and compare past dates. This caused enormous credibility issues for GA in our eyes, as retrospect data had changed.
Other issues No integrated campaign management. Only 4 funnels per profile Google has yet, to answer comprehensively what information they are gathering, using and for what purpose [big grey area]. GA also had some flaky metrics during an earlier implementation of a asp .net and Ajax... especially the homepage [asp .net and Ajax].
Tie in with AdWords is excellent (as it should be).
It's nice, pie charts are cool as the bees knees and it's free... but it's not perfect.
Do I use it... yes. do I love it... somewhat. Is there better... yes, but at a cost.
Prior Metrics experience: Webtrends, Click-tracks and Urchin [pre and post Google acquisition].
Listserv Software Thread
We are once again in the hunt for listserv solution. I want to get some feedback from other agencies on what email management software they use requesting information on the type of email management software is being used and in what type of environment (Windows, Unix, etc.).
I believe that LSoft is the favorite but I want to determine what others are using.
These agencies seem to be using it –
- New York State Department of Criminal Justice
- New York State Energy Research and Development Authority
- New York State Department of Education
- New York State Department of Mental Health
Can anyone give me some feedback.
Here at NYSDEC, we are using Mailman on Sun Solaris (Unix) servers.
Hi Donna. Here at Tax and Finance, we are also making use of LSoft's ListServ (running on Windows) in conjunction with their HDMail appliance.
We use Lyris List Manager.
Review Tool for RFP for Website Thread
Good morning, all. I hope that this isn't too off-topic, and that some of you may have something that we can use (rather than recreating the wheel).
The Bureau of Child and Adolescent Health (Dept. of Health), in collaboration with several programs in DOH, recently posted a request for proposals for the development of an adolescent/young adult focused website for sexual health information. We don't have the staff time/experience to develop the website in-house.
Does anyone happen to have a proposal/application review tool for website development that we could tweak to correspond with our RFP? The proposals have all been received; we just need the review scoring sheet so that we can actually go ahead with the review process.
Translation Thread
My Agency has a very important publication (http://opdv.state.ny.us/help/fss/contents.html) that will be available in print in Chinese, Russian and Arabic very soon, but we cannot post the PDF files because do not have the language resources to create the html alternative formats. The folks who did the translations for us are not able to create the html files.
- Has anyone had a similar experience?
- Any recommendations for anyone who could help us (preferably free of cost or low cost)? We receive Federal Funding, so the documents will need comply not only with the NYS Accessibility Standards, but also with Section 508.
- What to avoid?
I am sure there are many issues that we need to consider so please feel free to offer ideas.
Webcasting Thread
We use TotalWebcasting for our monthly board meetings. They have been great and I highly recommend their services. They do a bunch of production video work for other agencies (DOH, DEC), but I just use them to webcast the live meetings and caption the archive webcasts. We just encode the a/v feed out of our video conferencing system.
In addition to webcasting in Windows Media format, 2 months ago they switched us over to Flash instead of Real. Now all the Mac and Linux folks can see our webcasts.
Talk to Robert Feldman : rfeldman@totalwebcasting.com
My thoughts are if we had many internal videos, I would probably get my own media server for internal use but I would still outsource the public facing videos. Our iPort (internet connection) is only 10mb, so 30, 300kb video streams would just about saturate the connection.
And to save money, have you given any thought to using youtube? I just read the feds are negotiating with Google to get their own youtube channels.
This a belated note, but here at the NYS Insurance Department, we also use TotalWebcasting in this area.
We have had good success with them, too. As Michael noted below, we recommend the services and contacting Robert Feldman if you are interested in pursuing their offerings.
Flex Thread
We run everything on Windows 2003 server, therefore I am limited in the ability to use PhP and was wondering how many people were doing production work in FlexBuilder. I would like to know if it saves time over coding in .NET (currently using) and I wanted to know how big the user (within the state) community is. What are some opinions on it, and how is the learning curve? I have no ColdFusion background, I came from ASP to ASP.NET. The demo in the last meeting showed that Flex is apparently simple to be made to accessibility standards. I was testing the IDE, however I was building MXML not HTML as in the demo.
We currently use Flex 3 to create elements on our web pages that are interactive.
Flex itself uses a combination of MXML, ActionScript 3, and CSS to create customized applications that can either be embedded on a webpage, or run as a desktop application using Adobe Air.
When used on the web, Flex compiles the MXML, ActionScript and/or CSS into a SWF that then you embed on your webpage.
Flex creates Rich Internet Applications that will be just as accessible as anything developed in Adobe Flash.
Flex can also be used in conjunction with PHP/ColdFusion to allow you to interact with databases.
In the demonstration in the last guild meeting there was a class in Flex for accessibility that allowed the jaws reader to correctly parse the application. This is much more time consuming in .net and I was wondering if you were using this feature?
IIS ASP Thread
Today I had restarted our web server and none of the includes and some asp loaders are functioning. If you load it in Mozilla you can actually see the script but it does not load. There was no installation or updates done on the server however settings like the default file types were set to the default after the reboot, and I had to add index.html and all the other ASP configuration. It seems like all of the site setting were wiped out. I have reset them to match the backup. IIS 2003 is the server, parent paths are turned on and the rest of the configuration seems fine.
I have put up a temporary page in the meantime, but the here is what the real files look like. http://www.agmkt.state.ny.us/indextemp.html the side menu and the banner are missing as are all the included files. Our code had functioned just fine until the reboot and now all the sites that use includes on our server do not have their loaders work. This is not a code issue.
I have spent about 6 hours now trying to figure it out and it seems like a simple config issue, but I cannot place my finger on it. I am the sole developer and admin on the server and I cannot place my finger on the problem.
Did you check the application extensions in IIS? I believe you have to have the extension for SSI set up in the application configuration area.
I followed a few links from your temporary page.
It looks like your ASP pages are functioning:
http://www.agmkt.state.ny.us/AD/release.asp?ReleaseID=1781
but your .html pages are not:
http://www.agmkt.state.ny.us/contact.html You may need to set your .html files to be “executable”, meaning there is code (asp) that needs to be parsed. That can be done via CONFIG (best option), or file by file (not so great).
I also notice that on your contact.html page, you are using Apache-style includes. *Usually* in this instance, a (unix) server will look for .shtml as an executable, but again, that is a config issue (really it can have any extension as long as it is identified in the conifg).
You may also want to check you .htaccess file to see that the server.
At some point you may want to consider consolidating your includes to one to use all ASP includes. In IIS, I believe that pages that have (only) includes are usually configured as .inc and files that call the #exec directive are usually .stm, and pages that have executable ASP code are named .asp.
This article talks about that.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms525940.aspx
I’m sure you are not ready to re-name all your files, so working in the config/IIS Manager seems to be where the solution lies.
Not sure if this helps or not. Probably just pointing out the obvious. I think you are on the right path, seems as though settings were reverted during your reboot.
I think I got it, we out mapping for html to asp were wiped. Thank you
CAPTCHA/reCAPTCHA Thread
DMV is considering using an image CAPTCHA to prevent robot attacks on a new index search application that will be available to the public.
We have discussed accessibility, and the Project Manager has stated that the index search is not required to use the transaction that sits behind it, so the transaction is still accessible without using the index search. He also has pointed out that plug-ins are available for browsers that allow screen readers to decipher image CAPTCHAs.
I wonder if any other agencies have used or considered CAPTCHAs and can share their decisions and experiences.
I’ve used reCAPTCHA. It is a free CAPTCHA solution.
From http://www.captcha.net/:
Accessibility. CAPTCHAs must be accessible. CAPTCHAs based solely on reading text — or other visual-perception tasks — prevent visually impaired users from accessing the protected resource. Such CAPTCHAs may make a site incompatible with Section 508 in the United States. Any implementation of a CAPTCHA should allow blind users to get around the barrier, for example, by permitting users to opt for an audio or sound CAPTCHA.
reCAPTCHA offers this functionality: http://recaptcha.net
Just some personal feedback on the reCAPTCHA solution ... I was interested because we are getting a lot of form spam from our employee directory contact form, so we have been looking into ways to combat this. I just tried the reCAPTCHA audio captcha. I'm not at all sure that's a good option. I did about 4 different ones and came up with multiple incorrects - never did successfully complete one. I used to do transcription some, so I didn't think I was that much of a slouch when it came to correctly typing what I hear.
I was surprised to find that the audio captcha does not actually say the words that the video captcha displays. I also had at least one of the video captchas that I absolutely could not decipher.
Your mileage may vary.
We are looking at a "human intelligence question" solution. An explanation of the concept can be found here: http://www.softswot.com/hiiscript.php. This sounds more accessible, as long as the questions are not difficult or tricky.
The way the new policy is written (NYS-P08-005), EVERYTHING on your web site needs to be accessible, so your project manager is wrong. Captchas are inherently inaccessible, unless you record a sound file that people who can't see the image can use to enter the special code.
I would defer to screen reader users on the efficacy of screen reader plugins to decipher captchas, but as an un-disabled person, I can't decipher them half of the time they're presented to me.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for the input. Your experience with audio C’s is something I read about while researching this. if you are interested, I found this site that explains and offers text, logic or human intelligence C’s: http://textcaptcha.com/
