Sakai and Fluid

[Colin Clark]

Hi John,

On 5-May-08, at 10:15 AM, John Norman wrote:

> Looking at Nathan's UX work on combining MyAccount pages with  
> preferences, I realised that I didn't know the status of 'Preferable'

I'm glad you like PreferAble! We built it a few years ago as a  
prototype to show how new approaches to personalization and  
accessibility could be added to Sakai. Since then, it hasn't seen a  
lot maintenance or improvement, but I think with some work it could be  
useful in the Sakai distribution.

A few months ago, Steve Githens and I were working working on a port  
of PreferAble's JSF tool to RSF. I helped to rework the markup and  
make the JavaScript more unobtrusive. Steve was working on the tool  
code. I haven't checked in with Steve on his status recently, but I  
know he's ported similar tools very quickly. This version would form a  
good basis for ongoing improvement.

We're also planning to build a preferences editor component as part of  
Fluid, moving much of PreferAble's logic onto the client side. The  
server-side code could then be pared back to the storage and retrieval  
of preferences. From a functional perspective, early thinking suggests  
something along the lines of the BBC's "Display Options" feature on http://www.bbc.co.uk/ 
, allowing users to customize the display using pre-baked templates or  
individual options.

The current plan is to work on this for the Fluid Infusion 0.6  
release, due out in September. Help is, as always, encouraged and  
appreciated.

> For my part, I would like to see 'Preferable' be part of standard  
> (accessible) Sakai. As we move to implement Nathan's designs, I  
> would also like keyboard accessibility support to be built in  
> wherever the Fluid/JQuery plugin can be used. Where a 'component' is  
> used that matches a component in the Fluid library, I would like to  
> suggest our policy should be to either use the Fluid component or  
> work with Fluid to produce a component that works for Sakai and  
> matches the accessibility of the Fluid component.

I agree. This sounds like a sensible approach. We're working on  
improved documentation for the Fluid/jQuery keyboard accessibility  
plugin, but it's ready to use for many cases now. Here's the in- 
progress API documentation:

http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Keyboard+Accessibility+Plugin+API

I really hope our existing components--the Reorderer, Uploader, and  
some of the experimental widgets such as InlineEdit--will be useful in  
implementing the UX initiative designs. We're also really interested  
in getting involved in helping to build reusable components found in  
Nathan's designs.

Looking forward to a fruitful collaboration,

Colin

---
Colin Clark
Technical Lead, Fluid Project
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto
http://fluidproject.org