Re: accessible on-line survey

Marjolein Katsma wrote:

> It looks like a very interesting project, but it's not a FOSS PHP
> library.
> 
> What it is, is a free on-line service where you can *build*
> standards-compliant forms which you can then download to use, together
> with a (free) JavaScript library to provide extra functionality (care
> seems to be taken that the form will function correctly without
> JavaScript though). There's a Form Library with forms that have already
> been made and can be used or modified and a collection of stylesheets
> (Form Garden) is planned.
> 
> One could conceivably use this to build a nice (and accessible)
> front-end for a survey, but you'd still have to build all of the
> back-end for actually gathering, storing and processing the
> information.

I use a lot of web forms, written in Perl with a MySQL backend.  To save 
time, I wrote a little (Perl) programme that looks at the schemata of 
all the tables in a database and produces for each a form, SQL insert, 
update and deletes and also a query to populate a hash which can be used 
to pre-define form values when going it to edit.  Whilst the results are 
never a finished product, they certainly save a lot of work.

It would be easy enough to produce a similar tool to generate PHP and, 
for a regular PHP user, probably to write the whole thing in PHP.  From 
an accessibility standpoint, using a tool like this does a certain 
amount of quality control by making sure that all form fields have 
associated labels, valid markup, etc.  Although I use a Tk front end, my 
tool is far to crude to be a true authoring tool and would certainly not 
be WTAG compliant.

I would assume that to have an accessible survey, the survey build tool 
would have to be WTAG compliant, otherwise it's only half accessible...

Cheers

M


-- 
Matthew Smith
Kadina Business Consultancy, South Australia
Work: <http://www.kbc.net.au> Personal: <http://www.mss.cx>

Received on Tuesday, 19 April 2005 22:25:05 UTC