[phpesp-dev] GUI design considerations

[James E. F. <jf...@ac...>]

When doing any GUI design please keep these points in mind.
I do want phpESP to have a nice "look-and-feel" but at the
same time I want it to be usable by as many people as
possible. I use lynx from time to time myself...

-James

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2001 16:16:16 -0500
From: Matt Campbell <ma...@fr...>
To: jf...@ac...
Subject: Great job on phpESP!

Hello,

I work for InHouse Radio Networks, Inc., and we're working on a product
called the Freedom Box which gives blind and other disabled people
access to the Internet through speech synthesis and speech recognition.
We're going to run a market survey to find out about our potential
customers, and I was put in charge of setting it up.  I was going to
write my own custom PHP scripts to do it, but thought I'd first look to
see if a PHP survey package was already available.

I found phpESP (1.2beta3), and decided to check it out.  I've got it up
and running, and the president of the company is very pleased with it.
Great job, and thanks for making this package available for free!

A few suggestions:

1.  Include alt attributes for all your images, especially the form
buttons for the tabs on the survey creation/editing pages.  This way
people using text-only browsers such as Lynx, as well as blind people
using screen readers, can tell what these images are.

2.  Use drop-down menus instead of radio buttons whenever possible
(e.g. on the page for creating or editing a survey question).
The president of this company that I'm working for is blind himself,
and he says that drop-down menus are much easier to use with his screen
reader than radio buttons are.  Besides, drop-down menus take up less
space on the page.

3.  When rendering a survey question with "!other" as the last choice,
it would be best if phpESP displayed "other" or "Other" without the
exclamation mark.  Also would it be possible to include an "Other"
choice and an accompanying text field for questions where the choices
are presented in a drop-down menu?  That way we don't have to use radio
buttons at all.

I've implemented #1 and #2 in our local copy, and will work on #3 soon.

Thanks,
-- 
Matt Campbell
Programmer and System Administrator
InHouse Radio Networks, Inc.
http://www.freedombox.cc/