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i have seen that the core forms in joomla have been modified in a developers site to try to get them to be accessible

will the forms be accessible in joomla 1.5 as well as the tables based design being modified to allow for css only layout?

i have just posted this to philtaylors site as I thought it was important for him to get the philaform to be as accessible as possible

html tag in custom form layouts not working well with fvalidate, it is coming up with an error popup that is really not at all suitable for a form. this is actually not so good as it means the accessible forms i am trying to create cannot use this important tag. This is even happening one i have tried to include names for the labels

I think that the code running philaform layout is arcane and makes life extremeley difficult to style with css. When will this be updated to reflect the more accessible forms that will be included in future Joomla 1.5 releases?

I suggest the following accessible techniques
option to setup name of div wrapper for form
legend for naming the form
label with accesskey for all fields
hints created in seperate named divs or spans
explanations of when to use radio boxes and when to use lists
trimming of form fields using javascript from stuffandnonsense site
classes applied to the essential form fields instead of additional image that are then styled with background image using css
Don’t return users to an altered form, why does the form made using philaform not remember what you have typed if there is an error and it returns to the same form page to complete where there are errors e.g. highlight fields not complete instead of a pop up to validate.

this is a really good place to take a look
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/sensibleforms/
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/forms/
http://jeffhowden.com/code/css/forms/
http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archi ... ields.html
http://www.formassembly.com/

The "core" forms in 1.0.x and above (including 1.5) are conforming to some manner of accessible layouts ("label for" on most core components that use forms).

Custom forms, are by nature, custom, and it is the responsibility of the developer implementing the custom form solution/component/module in J! to adhere to standards if they so wish. You can't exactly demand all 3PD devs to conform to standards, since some obviously don't have the technical know-how on how to deliver clean, accessible, well-formed code.

thanks

Though I am trying to get some sort of component/module/plugin (CMP) library into 1.5, so that people can pretty much build accessible components, including forms, on the fly..

The way I envision it is that the code becomes simpler for developers, meaning they don't have to worry about accessibility considerations, since the system will be designed to ouput accessible bits and pieces of CMPs for them..

It also means the J! team don't need to "enforce" stuff to get standards-based quality CMP work, but more encourage people to build to the CMP specs (as the specs will be, by nature, accessible).

sounds very interesting.

if you would like any recomendations/sample code for common elements let me know.

I am looking into setting up an accessible meyer like css photogallery and use the lightbox.js technique for larger pics, this would be excellent for photo galleries as most current gallery systems seem to only allow for tables based layouts. wouldnt know how to set up the php side of things though.

Have you considered:

http://www.cat-scan.net/ ?

Whilst it isn't integrated into J! (flat file script), it does allow CSS based design for galleries.. I've wrapped it into J!-based clients sites before.

I was thinking of more of a solution like over at dougbowman http://www.stopdesign.com/log/2005/08/2 ... lates.html

however this cat scan thing sounds good if used with the lightbox technique and choose not to display certain bits of code like the breadcrumbs in the popup lightbox overlay

have you seen the lightbox technique? it is at http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox/

I've seen it before.

I regularly hang around http://www.particletree.com and they've done some very interesting things with Lightboxing. 

i have been working on a wee design for an hour or so combining a few other techniques from eric meyer and particle tree one

having slight issues with the size of overlay box but otherwise his technique is better lightbox as it can support better picture descriptions than just a title from the img link which the other lightbox technique uses

http://www.benscottarts.co.uk/ownsites/ ... ndex3.html

found this for forms i think i am going to use and suggest this for all forms in the future, what do you reckon to it ?

http://wufoo.com/

i personally think this is excellent and would really help with collecting data and creating standards based forms

also thanks again for the tip about the gallery system i have found http://zenphoto.org/ and think i t may do the trick

also was wondering have you ever tried webcalendar and seen it ported to joomla well? I have been using this for calendars as it has many features but main one is ical import