This Bugzilla instance is a read-only archive of historic NetBeans bug reports. To report a bug in NetBeans please follow the project's instructions for reporting issues.
1. The About/IDE/Platform/DevHome buttons have large amounts of text on images. There is no ALT text for these images, so a sight-impaired user cannot read the homepage. 2. Even though I am not blind, I can't read very small text. So, I need to be able to "zoom" the text if I am to be able to read it. However, I cannot do so because the text is embedded in graphics. 3. The "username" and "password" fields have images as their labels, with no ALT text or title, which means they are not accessible. I suggest to replace all of the image-based text on the home page with "regular" HTML based text. The web page does look great but it just isn't functional enough, especially when a11y is taken into account.
Created attachment 7423 [details] No ALT, No img sizes
Created attachment 7424 [details] All correct under IE
Created attachment 7425 [details] some problems under Mozilla
Info on the following attachments: All of them are the page headers under different conditions (IE 5.5 and Mozilla 1.1). picture_web_A11Y.png - Mozilla with "Block images from this server" turned on for netbeans.org - strange choice, more stranger look. picture_web_A11Y_ie.png - IE with all images turned off - no problems with L&F picture_web_A11Y_moz.png - Mozilla with all images turned off - some problems with L&F, though I feel they are mozilla's bugs. I looked through the HTML code and found it OK, ALT specified everywhere, image sizes are specified everywhere. Please file an attachment with demo, Brian, I cannot find the problems you mentioned. Consider creating RFE to have less graphics on netbeans.org
The page I am talking about is the _homepage_ (http://www.netbeans.org/index.html) not the header. I didn't find any ALT text for the images that say "The NetBeans IDE is a world-class development enviroment...", etc., etc. The issue isn't with the headers/footers but rather with the single web page.
Created attachment 7427 [details] http://www.netbeans.org with no images
Also, the reason I said "I suggest to replace all of the image-based text on the home page with 'regular' HTML based text" is because I think it would be tedious to keep the ALT text and the text embedded in the images in sync, since there is so much text.
I agree Brian; the img choice was a decision made by the marketing team for marketing and design reasons, but particularly in light of the accessibility aspect I think this needs revisiting. I'm splitting off your 3rd point into a seperate issue, as the username/pwd imgs are used on the entire site, not just the home page. See issue 27449. Meantime I'll start work on overhauling the index.
Just FYI : I have redesigned the index page as html/txt, with much lighter use of images. The marketing team is not 100% satisfied with the visual look of the new version, and has requested that I work with our graphic artist to improve this. I will update the issue with further developments.
FYI you can see the page in development at http://www.netbeans.org/download/temp/text-index.html
Yes, that is much better. The text is resizable at least. It seems that the only obvious difference is with the extra whitespace that is present, and that the font is at a bigger (readable) size by default. I think marketing should be happy that the text is actually readable!
Asked our graphic artist for tips, he suggested letting the middle part of the cube side stretch, and rounding off the top and bottom. This didn't look good :-/ So I've tried something else ... the latest installment does away with the curved cube bg. Putting it to marketing team. New version is at the same URL.
OK, I have approval for the latest version; it is live at testwww and will propagate to www within ~1hr. Tested and looks good on : Win2k : NN4.7, Opera 6.x, IE 5.5, Mozilla Win98 : NN4.7, IE 5.5, Mozilla WinXP : NN4.7, IE 6, Mozilla Linux : NN4.x, Opera, Mozilla, Galeon Solaris : NN4.x
We recently moved out from Collabnet's infrastructure