Bottlehead Forum

General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: Jim R. on October 23, 2009, 10:43:24 AM

Title: What did you do to the forum???
Post by: Jim R. on October 23, 2009, 10:43:24 AM

Doc or David,

Did you do something to change the format of the forum?  Yesterday all the messages within a thread were seperated into individual table structures.  Today there are no tables within a thread, nor any other kind of structural markup for individual responses.  To me and my screen reader this means a difference of whether the forum is convenient or impossible to use.

I know I didn't change any settings or do any browser updates, so something must have changed within the forum's display settings.

Help!

-- Jim

Title: Re: What did you do to the forum???
Post by: dbishopbliss on October 23, 2009, 11:38:54 AM

I changed the background color of the tabs, but I don't expect you would notice that.  I just reviewed the source and everything still appears to be formatted as tables.  I think I heard there is a mobile version that automatically loads, I wonder if you got that somehow.  You have my email, so let me know if things do not get better.

Title: Re: What did you do to the forum???
Post by: Jim R. on October 25, 2009, 03:09:07 PM

Hi David,

After a lot of configuration and browser version experiments this looks to be an issue with the latest version of Firefox and my screen reader.  Now to figure out why, even though I have auto updates turned off in FF, I still got the update. :-)

Of course the nezxt update will probably fix it.

Thanks again,

Jim

Title: Re: What did you do to the forum???
Post by: Grainger49 on October 26, 2009, 12:43:05 AM

Jim, I am running Firefox V 3.0.14.  There are no problems with displaying the text or threads. But... sometimes it shows new posts and when I click on the blue icon on the home page the next page shows no new posts.  But if I just open the folder (main topic) all new posts are shown there.

Title: Re: What did you do to the forum???
Post by: Jim R. on October 26, 2009, 12:55:29 AM

Hi Grainger,

I'm using the same version but I'm also blind and using a screen reader to read the web pages, and this is some issue that exists between the way firefox and the screen reader are communicating.   can sort-of remedy the situation by telling my screen reader to identify all table structures, but that generates a lot of extra verbiage from the speech synthesizer as it identifys every single table construct on every page, and with SMF (and the Asylum as well), that is a lot of useless chatter that slows things down quite a bit.

I'm sure a future update to firefox will fix this as I'll get the bug logged and directed to the right people.

Thanks,

Jim

Title: Re: What did you do to the forum???
Post by: dbishopbliss on October 26, 2009, 01:40:58 AM

Jim - I've noticed that SMF uses a lot of extra tables for formatting.  Probably written before cascading style sheets were popular.  Do you know if there is a tag I could add to the formatting tables so your screen reader would ignore them?

David

Title: Re: What did you do to the forum???
Post by: Jim R. on October 26, 2009, 01:46:45 AM

David,

I don't know.  I'll have to check.  I can set table reading to "on" where all tables are read, "smart" where it only reads the tables of topics and used to read the individual response tables in a thread, and "off" in which no table structures are identifiedd.  I always leave it set to "smart" and that works 99
% of the time, unless Firefox does something to break it, which I think has happened here,.

I'll try to find out exactly what that mechanism is and see if it can be patched on the page source.

-- Jim

Title: Re: What did you do to the forum???
Post by: Grainger49 on October 26, 2009, 05:09:50 AM

Quote from: jrebman on October 26, 2009, 12:55:29 AM

Hi Grainger,

I'm using the same version but I'm also blind and using a screen reader to read the web pages, and this is some issue that exists between the way firefox and the screen reader are communicating.   can sort-of remedy the situation by telling my screen reader to identify all table structures, but that generates a lot of extra verbiage from the speech synthesizer as it identifys every single table construct on every page, and with SMF (and the Asylum as well), that is a lot of useless chatter that slows things down quite a bit.

I'm sure a future update to firefox will fix this as I'll get the bug logged and directed to the right people.

Thanks,

Jim

Jim,  Got'cha! It makes sense to me now.

Title: Re: What did you do to the forum???
Post by: Geek on October 26, 2009, 09:33:17 PM

Quote from: dbishopbliss on October 26, 2009, 01:40:58 AM

Jim - I've noticed that SMF uses a lot of extra tables for formatting.  Probably written before cascading style sheets were popular. 

Nope, done on purpose so non CSS browsers, like WAP and simple browsers (including the command line types) see it as functional as full fledged GUI browsers like Opera and FF.

Cheers!

Title: Re: What did you do to the forum???
Post by: Jim R. on October 30, 2009, 06:57:43 AM

David,

Make any changes overnight?  Now the smart tables are working again.  I didn't update my screen reader or change it's configurations in any way, and it doesn't appear that firefox was updated either.

Whatever you did, thank you :-).

-- Jim