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Ken Petri replied on November 20, 2009 15:28 to the problem "Fix needed: CAPTCHA in Ning sign-up unusable by the blind" in Ning:
Just checked again. Still no changes.... Any Ning support folks listening?-
Ken Petri replied on November 11, 2009 19:07 to the idea "Need for a better HTML editor for Ning blogs, notes, and pages" in Ning:
Just checking back in. Lots of great response on this one. Nick Official Rep: any idea when this might change. Now that the big work on OpenSocial has been rolled out....
By the way, we recently took a look at another good open source editor: CKEditor. The old FCKEditor was an accessibility nightmare, but the new version is as good as TinyMCE re: accessibility (with a few minor tweaks that could easily be added in--specifically a guide on how to use the shortcut keys readily readable/visible and some minor ARIA tweaks).
Another thing to consider, perhaps as an option for users, is to preference allow Textile or Markdown. For many users a good WYSIWYG will be adequate, but for some users with disabilities and for others, due to usability preferences, Markdown and/or Textile are preferable. One serviceable implementation that uses JavaScript to generate HTML from Textile or Markdown is Jay Salvat's Mark It Up. -
Ken Petri replied on October 23, 2009 11:25 to the problem "Fix needed: CAPTCHA in Ning sign-up unusable by the blind" in Ning:
OK, well, you guys are most of the way there (with the deaf-blind caveat, noted above).
Please enable the audio challenge in ReCAPTCHA. If you reply to this post after you do it, I'll go in and check it with a screen reader. (That's free usability testing--can't beat that!) -
Ken Petri reported a problem in Ning on September 01, 2009 18:18:
Fix needed: CAPTCHA in Ning sign-up unusable by the blindNing needs to re-think the CAPTCHA required for sign-up.
We all understand the necessity of CAPTCHA for such a huge and visible community service. However, the particular CAPTCHA Ning is using prevents blind and deaf-blind users from joining Ning.
This is a particular frustration for me, as I have set up two networks that have current members who are blind and will have more blind members. One network is for a medical center disability research institute and the other is for a state university system project geared toward disability service providers.
Blind users who rely on screen readers to interact with web pages cannot sign up with Ning because of the CAPTCHA at the bottom of the sign up form.
As an intermediate solution, consider using a CAPTCHA that offers an audio solution alternative. One decent one is reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA has the additional benefit of using correct solutions to disambiguate suspect words in OCR for digital book creation.
reCAPTCHA is an intermediate solution because it cannot be used by the deaf-blind. Nevertheless, Ning will certainly gain some respect within the visually impaired community by switching to it. (Deaf-blind users might use WebVisum or other service, until a full solution is found. Also, WebAIM has a good article on alternatives to CAPTCHA, in case you want to ditch CAPTCHA altogether.)
Though you only have one other complaint regarding accessibility of CAPTCHA at this point, such problems can bring extremely unwelcome attention from the blind community, which is often very vocal (and on occasion litigious).
We would very much like to use Ning for our communities. It's a great system. But I cannot overemphasize the severity of this CAPTCHA problem. Please fix it immediately!
One other thing to note: there are low cost, off-shore "agencies" that will solve CAPTCHA for automated spammers (see decaptcha, for instance). So CAPTCHA is really not bulletproof, anyway.
Best,
ken -
Ken Petri replied on September 01, 2009 17:43 to the idea "Audio Captcha Function should be added to sign-up" in Ning:
Thanks for posting this. I'm going to put in another topic with the same idea with some stronger language. This is something that absolutely must be correctly immediately. -
Ken Petri started following the idea "Audio Captcha Function should be added to sign-up" in Ning.
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Ken Petri replied on July 15, 2009 18:51 to the idea "Need for a better HTML editor for Ning blogs, notes, and pages" in Ning:
Hi Nick
Your points are mostly on target. But I'd like to amend them a bit:
* It's not just that you strip out HTML, you also change the formatting of the HTML (so lines in the code wrap oddly or end tags get sandwiched next to content) and this makes subsequent editing of source difficult.
* Not page breaks, but HTML break tags. The WYSIWYG editor is "stupid" and thinks when I hit return I want a break tag, when, normally, I want a new paragraph, instead. In TinyMCE, for example, if I want a break tag, I hit Shift + Enter. An Enter keypress gives me a new paragraph (or new list item, as appropriate to context).
My advice, from experience, is you will waste time creating your own editor. Use an already established, powerful, and robust editor, such as TinyMCE. Pair down its feature set so that the editor enforces (helps enforce) good HTML coding practices.
The aesthetics of the editor are important, of course. But much more important is the functionality and quality of code produced.
Hey, and I'm really pleased Ning is now considering this! -
Ken Petri replied on May 26, 2009 21:25 to the idea "Need for a better HTML editor for Ning blogs, notes, and pages" in Ning:
These are great comments, thanks to all of you for supporting the idea and for providing resources.
Has anyone started looking at OpenSocial? I know that Ning will soon support OpenSocial Apps network-wide, not just as user-specific "enhancements." Maybe one of the better editors, such as TinyMCE, could be ported to a Ning OpenSocial application (would need, of course, to check on copyright issues, though...).
So, while I think having a widget on the site somewhere (Zohra), off-site (Ning Directory), or creating content in an external/desktop editor and pasting in (ThunderX (and what I do)) are good ideas, they are all essentially work-arounds--ways of getting around a fundamental deficiency of Ning. I should not have to go elsewhere to get a good editing experience. I should be able to have that experience right on the page I am editing/creating.
Porting an editor to Open Social and making it a Ning App might be a good means for adding functionality, instead of just working around a fundamental problem.
Even with this, though, there are things to consider and things to work around in Ning:
- Ning tends to add breaks where ever there are blank lines in your code
- Ning will HTML-encode broken code: if you forget to close a tag, Ning thinks you want to have your HTML turned into characters and it will oblige you--so, any editor needs to produce perfect code
- Ning is very fussy about pre-formated code and code blocks, often adding breaks where you do not want them
- The Ning parser has a different set of rules for Pages and Notes as compared to blog posts. In essence, the parser is stricter and more limiting of HTML in blog posts.
- Any editor that gets implemented should be very selective about what buttons/functionality to include. For example, you should make sure that someone doesn't mistake large text for a heading. And headings on pages should start at H2, since only Ning itself creates H1s, etc. In other words, the buttons and functions in any WYSIWYG editor implemented for NIng should try to "force" the author to use properly structured, accessible HTML--not "junk code."
Another question: Can an OpenSocial Ning App be written that overrides a default Ning widget? That is, is it even possible to implement a nice HTML editor for Ning that takes the place of the default HTML editor/editors? How "open" is the OpenSocial API within Ning? -
A comment on the idea "Need for a better HTML editor for Ning blogs, notes, and pages" in Ning:
Hope some other folks start following this, too. Would really be nice to get some word on this from Ning core developers. – Ken Petri, on May 19, 2009 23:02 -
Ken Petri shared an idea in Ning on May 19, 2009 10:45:
Need for a better HTML editor for Ning blogs, notes, and pagesThe Notes pages in Ning currently have the most sophisticated editor, but even it is not very good compared with some of the in-browser HTML editors out there. It would be great to have a decent editor, such as TinyMCE, in Ning, especially for Pages and Notes.
I realize some features of a powerful editor such as Tiny are not appropriate. But it generates very good HTML. Having a very trimmed down version of Tiny for blogs, along with more a beefy features set for Pages and Notes would vastly improve content creation.
For example, in blog posts, a return is interpreted as an HTML break. Tiny and other smart in-browser editors read a carriage return as indication of a new paragraph and generate the appropriate HTML. That is a much better approach in terms of standards and accessibility.
Finally, I wish Ning would mess less with my HTML code, in blog posts, especially. If I am writing HTML in my blog posts, leave it alone, unless it is dangerous or malformed. If I type my paragraph or other tag so that it sits alone on a line, I do this so that subsequent editing of it is easier to read. Ning now "fixes" the code by sticking the text following a paragraph tag and the end paragraph tag all onto the same line, which makes for difficult to read code. It does other little rearrangements and munges, for example injecting breaks when it renders out pages--annoying: I had to write some JavaScript to yank out breaks from the DOM.
So, how likely are we to get better in-browser HTML editors and when? And can the text input parsing rules be dialed back a little, so that they don't reformat the raw code or "help" by inserting unwanted HTML breaks?
