Hello everyone,
I've been doing some maintenance on our forum over the past couple of weeks. This mostly involves technical upgrades, stuff like changing javascript requests to be asynchronous, that make the forum faster and safer but otherwise are mostly invisible to users.
I've now started slowly working on a more visible upgrade. It involves changing the various images used by the forum skins, with an end goal of replacing almost all of them (except for the Euro button, city skyline, and footer ads) with SVG or font-icon versions.
Making these changes is advantageous for several reasons. For example, the new images will load much faster, will be easier to edit and maintain, and will be resolution-independent (remain sharp no matter how much you zoom-in, important for mobile browsing).
However, there are a couple of important technical issues. The first is that the coding techniques used for these replacements, while by now well-supported, are still far from having universal support. Even though I try to test any forum changes I make in a variety of browsers and OSes, I don't have either the means or the time to test every single browser and platform combination. This is made worse by the fact that we don't have full access to the forum server and code, meaning that often I have to rely on less-than-perfect workarounds (hacks if you prefer).
The second is that, unless implemented very carefully, these changes can critically reduce forum accessibility. By accessibility I'm referring here primarily to users who need to use screen-readers or text-only browsers.
For these reasons, I will be implementing these changes gradually and at a very slow pace (which naturally also works well with my RL time constraints
). In the process of doing so, it'll be really helpful if you can report any issues that notice here in this thread. If some image suddenly disappears, or no longer looks like what you'd expect it to, then please make sure to post this here. If you only see the issue under some specific browser or device/OS, you should still report it, and naturally include these details.
It'll also be very helpful if someone browsing the forum using a screen reader could share their experience. If you don't feel comfortable doing so in public, you're welcome to contact me via PM (or on skype, if you have my skype). I'll be very interested in the feedback and hearing how we can improve forum accessibility (even if it's issues unrelated to icons).
For now, I have installed the new versions only in the following places:
-Euro bright skin, icons appearing at the top of the forum (next to preferences, inbox, etc.);
-Euro bright skin, icons for expanding/collapsing categories in the index page;
-All skins, new icons at the third row of the header (the colorful one, with the links for citizenship, handbook, etc.).
I've been doing some maintenance on our forum over the past couple of weeks. This mostly involves technical upgrades, stuff like changing javascript requests to be asynchronous, that make the forum faster and safer but otherwise are mostly invisible to users.
I've now started slowly working on a more visible upgrade. It involves changing the various images used by the forum skins, with an end goal of replacing almost all of them (except for the Euro button, city skyline, and footer ads) with SVG or font-icon versions.
Making these changes is advantageous for several reasons. For example, the new images will load much faster, will be easier to edit and maintain, and will be resolution-independent (remain sharp no matter how much you zoom-in, important for mobile browsing).
However, there are a couple of important technical issues. The first is that the coding techniques used for these replacements, while by now well-supported, are still far from having universal support. Even though I try to test any forum changes I make in a variety of browsers and OSes, I don't have either the means or the time to test every single browser and platform combination. This is made worse by the fact that we don't have full access to the forum server and code, meaning that often I have to rely on less-than-perfect workarounds (hacks if you prefer).
The second is that, unless implemented very carefully, these changes can critically reduce forum accessibility. By accessibility I'm referring here primarily to users who need to use screen-readers or text-only browsers.
For these reasons, I will be implementing these changes gradually and at a very slow pace (which naturally also works well with my RL time constraints
). In the process of doing so, it'll be really helpful if you can report any issues that notice here in this thread. If some image suddenly disappears, or no longer looks like what you'd expect it to, then please make sure to post this here. If you only see the issue under some specific browser or device/OS, you should still report it, and naturally include these details.It'll also be very helpful if someone browsing the forum using a screen reader could share their experience. If you don't feel comfortable doing so in public, you're welcome to contact me via PM (or on skype, if you have my skype). I'll be very interested in the feedback and hearing how we can improve forum accessibility (even if it's issues unrelated to icons).
For now, I have installed the new versions only in the following places:
-Euro bright skin, icons appearing at the top of the forum (next to preferences, inbox, etc.);
-Euro bright skin, icons for expanding/collapsing categories in the index page;
-All skins, new icons at the third row of the header (the colorful one, with the links for citizenship, handbook, etc.).
