Council member John Ellis, FIAP continues his series of short articles on making Web sites accessible to those with disabilities. We’d like to emphasise that these are much more about raising members’ awareness of their responsibilities, not least under the Disability Discrimination Act, than they are about code as such.
In my previous articles I have covered how, using properly designed Web sites with style sheets, visually impaired people can access our Web sites more easily by allowing them to override our wonderful colourful creations. At the same time we have cut down our bandwidth requirements (at least until all those – now enabled – people access the site) and speeded up our Web pages, all for just a little work.
There’s a tendency to equate ‘disability’ with ‘visual impairment’ in the context of Web sites. But there are many others. For example, HESA (the Higher Education Statistics Agency) reports that the most common disability among university students is dyslexia. In this article I am going to cover a separate group of people, those with mobility issues. Someone with Parkinson’s Disease or Multiple Sclerosis, for example, may not be able to use a mouse easily. He or she may, however, find it relatively straightforward to depress keys on the keyboard. This will be the point of this note.
Let’s consider a simple Web site with a few links on a Menu:
Home
What We Do
Testimonials
Contact Us
say.
Each link will normally be selected via a hyperlink that a mouse can access easily. We may also have set things up so that the user can scroll through the options using the TAB key. However, we can select each link directly from the keyboard by editing into the four HREF links:
accesskey = “H”
accesskey = “W”
accesskey = “T”
accesskey = “C”
respectively.
Now Alt-H will highlight ‘Home’ and ENTER will select it. Alt-W will do the same for ‘What We Do’ and so on.
Certain types of control will select first, e.g. Text Boxes, while Buttons will automatically Post, if that is the function, without the ENTER key having been pressed. Careful choice of keys is important. Be logical and beware – they will override the Application Menu Bar shortcuts! You might like to find a way of highlighting shortcut keys rather than (or in addition to) giving instructions. You could use the application standards of underlining the shortcut character, giving an explanatory message against each menu item, or highlighting the required character in a contracting colour. Either way you will have helped a great number of people who may access your site and possibly made it quicker to navigate for those, more able-bodied, who nevertheless have trouble using a mouse.
More (much more!) on these areas is available in the latest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (W3C Working Draft 11 March 2004) at www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-WCAG20-20040311/ and I’d welcome your comments and suggestions for further wrinkles and improvements.
You can contact John at john.ellis@wellis-technology.co.uk.
[Interesting project or development? Let us know at eo@iap.org.uk!]

Council member John Ellis, FIAP introduced, in March’s VSJ, some ideas about Web accessibility. Since then, in May, you’ll have seen Paul Lynham’s report on the presentation by Julie Howell from the RNIB to the Annual Symposium. Here, John takes things a stage further.
In my last article on making Web sites more accessible to those with visual impairments, we made some basic changes to the Web page, removing frames where possible or, at least, giving them meaningful titles. In addition, we added basic ALT tags to the images on our pages. We also added the Style Sheet to remove the basics of the Web page, font styles, sizes and colours etc. This allows people to then set local style sheets if they wish to override our defaults, perhaps to change the font size or colours to improve visibility. As Julie Howell said, it’s flexibility that counts – different conditions call for different strategies. We tend to assume that a visually impaired person will want a big font. But someone with glaucoma often needs a very small font because his or her visual field is small.
This may well reduce your Web page’s size, by removing the repetition of text size and font setting, as is often done by packages like FrontPage. Recently I had to work with a table of values on a Web page, generated by an ASP. Because the page had some 200 rows of figures with 5 columns of data, there was a lot of repetition in terms of the display characteristics. The page took nearly 60K bytes. Not the biggest page on the planet, but I thought it could be better and access improved.
By adding the following into the table structure:
<colgroup>
<col>
<col>
<col>
<col>
<col>
</colgroup>
and appending corresponding entries in my style sheet, I reduced the size of the page to 19K bytes.
So we’re telling the table that each column has a class in the style sheet. In this case I had a title to the left, followed by sets of figures in the alternate columns, and the last four columns alternated their colour for effect. The result of then removing the font sizes, colours and font style reduced the page to a third of its original size. That reduces download time on a 56Kb modem (assuming a 46Kb connection) from around 13 to 4 seconds.
We improved the customer’s experience in viewing the page, improved access to those who need more flexible viewing and, as a bonus, our bandwidth is not being eaten up. This page is heavily viewed so a saving is achievable as the pipe bandwidth can remain ‘as is’ and not be upgraded.
Also, you can give titles to columns and rows to explain what they represent. The specialised browsers used by blind people are designed to interpret them.
Next time I’ll focus on those with motor disabilities and show how Web sites can be improved to give them better access.
You can contact John at john.ellis@wellis-technology.co.uk
[Interesting project or development? Let us know at eo@iap.org.uk!]

New Web Site Features

Have you visited www.iap.org.uk, the IAP Web site, recently?  It may look the same, but under the covers it has been totally revamped.  The features that were merely promised by the old site are now fully implemented.  Members may find the following of particular interest:

• Email forwarding. If you feel FredBloggs123@hotmail.com is not quite the right image for a member of the Institution, you can have email sent instead to FredBloggs@iap.org.uk. We will then forward it to any email address you wish. Incidentally, Yahoo! Mail surveyed HR managers last year and discovered that most will not look at job applications quoting ‘wacky’ (or workplace) addresses. So an IAP address makes good sense.
• A link to your Web site. Search engines are more likely to find your Web site if it is linked to the IAP. A link will also boost the status of your site and tell people that you are a member of Britain’s leading body for software professionals. There are three kinds of link: Business, Education and Personal.
• Consultants’ Register. If you are available for consulting assignments (full or part-time) and of at least Associate Member status, you can have a free entry in the Register, which is available for search in the public part of the site.  Apart from providing you with easy access to fellow professionals, the Register can be a useful source of work.

These facilities are all accessible in the secure Members’ Area of the site.  If you do not yet have a Login name, complete the simple online form. We will process your application ASAP.
Christopher Hill FIAP of Programatic Solutions is our Webmaster and can be contacted at webmaster@iap.org.uk.

IAP Council

Five IAP Council members stood down at the end of May this year, after their three-year terms of office. They are Ray Butler, Steve Cumbers (IAP Vice President), John Ellis, Phillip Hamlyn and Selva Naidu.
Of these, only Phillip Hamlyn has indicated that he is unwilling to stand again. Only one nomination had been received from the general membership by the deadline of 21 February. So we have five candidates who can be co-opted to the five vacant seats and it will be unnecessary for the Institution to hold an election this year.
The new member is Siddique Khan, an Indian national who lives in London but has worked extensively in the Middle East. He is a specialist in Document Management, Knowledge Management, Imaging and Database Programming. Siddique takes up his post on 1 June.

New Fellows

We are pleased to welcome two new Fellows, who have been admitted to the Institution recently.

James Tweedie BSc(Hons) PhD
Dr. Tweedie is a specialist in geology and computing, with a strong academic background and extensive industrial/commercial experience in the field. Graduating in Geology at Aberdeen University in 1976, and working on his PhD until 1982, he managed to find time to undertake a number of jobs and consulting assignments and to teach himself computing. He was a field geologist for Consolidated Goldfields until 1983, moving to programming assignments in Germany until 1985. He was an enthusiast for the BBC computer of the period, developing software to make it more useful for business.
In 1985 Dr. Tweedie set up GeoMEM Consultants, his own vehicle for developing and reselling technical software for use in geology, mining and geo-environmental applications. This is what he is doing today. The company has undertaken a variety of key assignments for major players in the field. Many are highly specialised but, for example, it surveyed the breakthrough pilot hole for the Channel Tunnel, and developed a barcode-based borehole logging system for Amey Roadstone.

Joseph McKie
Joe McKie has spent almost the whole of his career with one company. He is nevertheless a versatile professional, with comprehensive training and varied experience including assignments of great responsibility. He joined Zurich Financial Services in 1988 (following three years as an analyst/programmer with the British Shoe Corporation), working initially on a system to speed the onward transmission of stock market data. In 1988 he was responsible for redesign and innovation in a number of areas, all with the purpose of streamlining Zurich’s operations across Europe.
In 1995 he took a consulting assignment with Zurich, moving to the USA, and providing technical consultancy to a number of the company’s centres in North America. Joe was responsible for support, product design and system implementation. Promotion to Senior IT Consultant in 1999 expanded his horizons worldwide. Today, as Senior ABAP Consultant to Zurich Financial Systems in Portsmouth, he has returned to Britain, but continues to push the boundaries of technology in his very specialised area.
[Don’t forget to email eo@iap.org.uk with items of news about you or your company.]

As you’ll have noticed in last month’s VSJ, one of the presentations at the upcoming Symposium is by Julie Howell of the RNIB. Council member John Ellis, FIAP sets the scene for her contribution here.
Recently I had to evaluate some Web sites for their accessibility to people with visual impairments. Why bother, you may ask, if they can’t see a screen? Well, first, someone can be registered blind but still have significant residual sight. And second, a little known (at least, less well known than it ought to be) Act of Parliament, the Disability Discrimination Act exists that imposes on us, the developers and designers of Web sites, a duty to provide access to those with any impairment. The Act includes any service, whether for the provision of information or to provide a purchase route.
The sad fact is that most Web sites (some of my own included) do not support any form of access for those with visual impairments, making those sites inaccessible to nearly 2 million potential customers. We are talking some big high street names here, folks! While organisations like the W3C and the RNIB try to promote best practice it seems to be failing to get down to the grass roots – US! From small independent developers and designers through to big corporate giants, many of us are missing the point. We need to make access easy.
So what are the issues? We need to break this down to the groups involved (I hope this is a broad enough for those with disabilities). We have the blind, visually impaired and those with motor problems. Each group has different requirements and even within those groups there are significant variations. Generally, those with motor or visual impairment problems will either have special keyboards or enhanced screen viewers to allow them to interact with their computers. While I know that isn’t 100% true, for the purposes of this article I will ignore this group. I plan a future article on the issues here.
For those who are blind there are some simple things we can do to aid the process. First, we need to understand the problem. Most of these users do not run Internet Explorer or Netscape. They have special browsers that convert pages into speech or Braille, processing only the text elements. These browsers read the pages left to right and top to bottom, including tables etc. They will interpret HTML formatting codes to inform the user of the page content.
There are, as always, limitations. Such browsers tend not to interpret frames. So we could create a site with no frames or two sites, the second being a frameless mirror, as it were. If we do have frames, we need to provide titles in the HTML so that suitably enabled browsers can tell the user what the frame is for, ‘Menu Frame’ or ‘Main Details Frame’, for example. As I mentioned, the browsers tend to read tables left to right, so using them to format a page can be disastrous in that they may read the page totally out of context. So it’s best to restrict table use to lists of figures and so on. You can also give the columns and rows titles that can be understood and interpreted.
The biggest issue is images. We all use graphics on our sites for impact. But that impact is lost on the blind user. It is, however, useful to know what the designer was trying to achieve, so adding an ALT tag to the image with a description, such as ‘Picture of the Queen’, gives the interpreter something to work with. Finally, using style sheets to describe your fonts and colours means that the browser doesn’t then interpret them, which makes the pages less confusing to the user. This confers some additional benefits. For example, partially sighted users can override your style sheet to allow them to define their own preferences. From a technical point of view, of course, the style sheet, if held a separate file is only downloaded once, reduces formatting in the Web page. This then reduces future page download times and improves performance, not to mention reducing the bandwidth required.
This just scratches the surface of the things we can do to help those who cannot see our work to be in a position, not just to understand our site, but possibly to visualise what we were trying to achieve. As Web sites move into their 3rd and 4th generations it is time for us to make them accessible not just because it is required by law, or because it can open up more sales opportunities but because it addresses the needs of a large number of people. I welcome any comments on the issue and will try to pick out individual items and expand on them in future articles.
You can contact John at john.ellis@wellis-technology.co.uk.
[Interesting project or development? Let us know at eo@iap.org.uk!]

University of Lincoln becomes IAP Education Partner
We are pleased to announce that the Institution has entered into a partnership arrangement with the University of Lincoln. This means that a range of courses offered by the University’s Faculty of Applied Computing Sciences will now be evaluated in terms of the IAP’s points system.
Mike Ryan, Director General of the Institution, said ‘This is good for Lincoln and good for us. From now on students will know in advance which of Lincoln’s courses to take if they want to become members of the IAP. This provides a new incentive for students to study at Lincoln. From the IAP’s viewpoint it provides a new source of courses that we can wholeheartedly recommend to the many people who call us for advice on training and IAP membership.’
Paul Reeve, Head of Department of Computing and Informatics in the Faculty of Applied Computing Sciences at Lincoln commented, ‘This is an excellent opportunity for students to enhance their academic qualification with a credential that has professional merit. The fact that students accumulate IAP credit at the unit level means that those on joint awards and those progressing through a programme can see an immediate and appropriate return on investment’.
Full details of these courses can be obtained through the Institution’s Education Officer, Robin Jones, at eo@iap.org.uk.
John Ellis (who writes elsewhere on these pages) and Raymond Butler are standing for re-election to the Council this year. They talk about themselves and their aims below.
I’m married with 4 children. I’ve been an IAP member since 1992 and in computing since 1977. My career began as a computer operator working on ICL and Honeywell mainframes for medium-sized computer bureaux and within a few years had progressed to programming primarily working in COBOL and RPG. These days, it’s VB and ASP but I still like the feel of a good COBOL program. I have been involved with systems ranging from Order Processing and Stock Control to Finance Systems in the retail/wholesale food industry. I spent 9 years in Local Government as an analyst/programmer and, finally, development manager. I was responsible for introducing Community Charge, Council Tax and Housing Benefit systems, plus most of the rest that goes with the territory. In later years I have been working on Insurance and Finance systems for software houses and financial institutions. Throughout my computing career I have been fortunate to be at the forefront of many new business applications, from the introduction of Barcodes in shops, introducing PCs to the business as a real tool to designing e-commerce solutions. In local government, I spent many years dragging them out of the dark ages into using desktop applications and VB to reduce costs and improve development times, opening the way for more efficient use of people and their time. While being currently employed by a financial institution, I also have business interests that include technical support, video-editing and software design companies and, of course, a Web design company. (They say the more you do, the more you can do.) As I am primarily an applications designer and programmer I feel I am probably well in the mainstream of IAP membership. I would like to see the IAP grow in terms of its membership and would continue to work to that aim by providing a timely information resource for members.

John Ellis, FIAP

I originally trained in mechanical engineering, gaining my HNC in 1977. I moved into IT in the 1980s, and studied part-time for the Graduate Diploma in Computer Science at what was then South Bank Polytechnic, graduating in 1992. I joined the IAP in 1993. I spent a number of years providing user support for a range of DOS and Windows applications and carrying out database development in dBase and, later, Microsoft Access. I became involved in Web site development in the mid-90s, and also gained some experience of network administration. During the past few years I have become a ‘back-room boffin’, working on Unix, Windows NT and Open VMS systems, mainly concerned with file system and user account maintenance and Internet technologies. I do most of my programming in C and Perl. If re-elected, I would want to continue to enhance the range of services provided by the Institution and to encourage interaction amongst the membership.

Raymond Butler, MIAP

[Don’t forget to email eo@iap.org.uk with items of news about you or your company.]

The Yearbook for 2004
We’re about to start putting together next year’s IAP Yearbook. As usual, we’re looking for contributions in the form of articles likely to appeal to members. Possible topics include (but are not limited to) programming and technology issues, industry trends, continuing education and career development. Also of interest will be general management issues – project or people management, for example. You’ll probably remember that last year’s review had articles on topics as diverse as e-learning, automatically tracking football matches, staff motivation and an innovative business process improvement tool. Their only uniform characteristic was the consistently high standard!
If you’d like to submit an article, ring Kay Stevenson on 01482 602645 or email her at kay.stevenson@kcom.com. Incidentally, if your article is accepted, you’ll be entitled to a discounted advertising rate in the publication.

IAP Provisional Accounts for the year ended 31 May 2003

Explanatory note: Although the accounts show a deficit for 2003, this is small in the context of the balance sheet reserves. As at 31st May 2003, these were £70,049 while for the previous year they were £73,294.

The New Council

Following this year’s electoral process, Council members and directors of the IAP, as at 1 July 2003, are:
Ken Abraham, Jim Bates (President), Ray Butler, Stephen Cumbers (Vice-president), Gilbert Edlin, John Ellis, Graham Fenton (Treasurer), Philip Hamlyn, Ian Hargrave, Edwin Keen, Scott Levy, Paul Lynham, David Morgan, Selva Naidu and John Weller.

Shields Going Like Hot Cakes

Well, perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration, but several members have already received their free IAP plaques and have literally nailed their colours to the office wall. A finger wagged, perhaps, to all their colleagues who have not yet signed up.
Seriously though, these plaques do look good. A shield-shaped base in dark wood, about 20cm high, carries a smaller raised replica of the Institution’s Coat of Arms, hand painted in full colour. A top scroll carries the name of the Institution and a bottom scroll the name of the member, hand painted to order. There is no charge – all you have to do is sponsor a friend to join the IAP. Your shield turns up in the post automatically. What could be simpler?
The following members have already earned their shields. Why not join them?
Dane Bradley-Carter                 (sponsored John Makeham)
Barry Everett                         (sponsored Simon Batham)
Donald Frazer                       (sponsored several people)
Neal James                            (sponsored Andrew Featherstone)
Daniel Morris                        (sponsored David Shannon)
[Don’t forget to email eo@iap.org.uk with items of news about you or your company.]

Council member John Ellis, FIAP muses on the plethora of software tools that we can call on and the difficulties of choosing the right one for a particular circumstance.
Recently I had to create a system that allowed multiple users requesting real-time quotes to connect to a quotes engine that only allowed single processes. An additional issue was that the quotes engine was a 16-bit application. All of this was in a Microsoft Transaction Server environment using Visual Basic 6, except the quotes engine, which was in a rather dated language. The problem was to make the quotes engine appear as if it was a 32-bit transaction component.
My first task was to make a wrapper around the quotes engine that could call it and be controllable. this was fairly easy. The quotes required an input and output file and a simple call to it, which meant that quotes could be called from VB easily, with some nice frilly features like quote process times.
The next step was to provide some sort of queue into the quotes engine and to allow the user’s quotes to be put into a pipeline via MTS components and then read by the quotes processor. Several choices were available, Microsoft Message Queue MSMQ or a database. I chose the latter and used MS Access to provide the pipeline with a table of incoming quote requests and a table for the results. These requests had unique IDs on which the MTS components could wait for a reply. The results could be retrieved when available, sleeping for half a second between checks for a reply.
All was going fine. Quotes were being queued, processed and sent back to the user in a timely manner. That was until we started load testing. Within a few minutes it was obvious we were having locking problems. Quotes could not be added or deleted from the queues as each process either queuing or retrieving quotes was locking another as soon as there were a few users. Timeouts occurred, the database threw back errors and the VB control program just kept reporting message after message, all errors.

So, back to square one. Cup of tea, a bit of hair pulling and, of course, a project manager going on and on about why does it not work, can we get a faster machine etc. I considered the MSMQ approach, but that requires SQL server and its own service to run it, which seems a bit like overkill for such a simple process.
Then an idea struck me. One of those gems I’ve never found a use for, ‘File System Object’, could be enlisted. This allowed us to interact with the file system of the PC, so instead of a database, we could use the directory structure and instead of tables we had an IN and OUT directory. Now we could write separate files into the IN box (effectively a record). The file system does not lock. In fact, the files can easily be opened, read and deleted without any locking issues at all. Altogether, we had a simpler idea, fewer overheads in terms of memory use, no database access and, on top of this, the process runs four times quicker.
The moral of this is, of course, that software developers have a vast array of tools at their beck and call. Some are very powerful and are the subject of charges (Access, SQL, MSMQ etc.), while some tools, like FSO, are free and can be used for purposes they were not necessarily designed for. Have you got other examples you’d like to share?
You can contact John at john.ellis@wellis-technology.co.uk.
[Something you’d like to get off your chest? Email me (Robin Jones) at eo@iap.org.uk.]

Michael D. Mitchell saw John Ellis’ comments on the missing PWS mystery and says:

I was shocked to discover, on reading John Ellis’ article in the November issue of Visual Systems Journal, that XP no longer supports PWS. I recently installed it on my Win98SE PC in order to experiment with some Active Server Pages development, having used PWS and IIS many times in the past few years. But my suggestion to John would be, ‘Don’t play their game!’ The ‘their’ being Microsoft, of course. I am fed up with how this company treats us in such a cavalier fashion and just shrugs its shoulders when small fry like me dare to complain. But all the while we just moan into our beer and go along with what they serve up to us, well, they’ve won, haven’t they?
To anyone contemplating an upgrade to XP – Home or Pro – I say, ‘Have you asked yourself the searching question, why do you think you need it?’ Many consumers just upgrade because, well, they have done it so often in the past that it’s become second nature like brushing one’s teeth in the morning. PWS is ideal for testing out ASP before uploading a suite of pages to a hosting service. If that is what John really needs, along with classic Visual Basic and not the abortion they are desperately trying to push on us, then I would either stick with Windows 98SE or perhaps consider Windows NT 4.0 or 2000. But let Microsoft beat me? No way!
Meanwhile, John himself offers a solution:
A light has appeared at the end of the tunnel!
‘Web Matrix Editor’ is a simple package that is only 1.1 MB big, although you do need the .NET framework and that’s quite bulky. But it is free, and it will run in only 128MB of memory.
The package contains three main components:

• A Class Browser that lists all of the classes in the Base Class Library, including their methods, properties and events.
• The Web Matrix Editor, a visual editor that allows you to build ASP.NET applications using familiar drag-and-drop techniques.
• A lightweight Web server for testing your Web applications (that’s the bit we want).

Why Microsoft could not have done this themselves I do not know but at least we can continue to develop on our laptops and those who are learning to develop Web sites have a cheaper alternative to IIS. You can download the ASP.NET Web Matrix from www.asp.net.
John Ellis FIAP
[Something you’d like to get off your chest? Email me (Robin Jones) at eo@iap.org.uk.]
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��+�*ms was the potential inconvenience to end-users. People were simply not prepared to tolerate such high levels of “policing” and the subsequent inconvenience. Microsoft appears to have struck a fair balance between protecting its interests and the needs of the end-user. I believe PA will become a fact of life in Microsoft products and I am sure it will not be long before other software vendors follow with similar methodologies.
As for the take-up of Windows XP, I can’t see there being a significant reduction in the number of copies being sold owing to the incorporation of PA once people understand the mechanism behind it. Let’s face it, sooner or later, most personal computer users will be using it, whether they like it or not.
Interesting project or development? Let us know at eo@iap.org.uk!

Council Member John Ellis, FIAP has a bone to pick with Microsoft. Surely shome mishtake?
Summer’s nearly over, the kids are back at school and the roads are jam-packed again with mothers dropping the little ones off, parking on double yellow lines or other convenient spots; a good time, I thought, to do some upgrades to the hardware and software.
So there I am upgrading my laptop to run Windows XP. It’s only a small laptop so XP Home should be enough for my needs. Off we go.
Install the OS, no problem.
Install Office, no problem.
Install VB 6. (Yes I know, but I have many years of components and customers who use them.)
Install Personal Web Server… ‘What do you mean it won’t work?’
It appears that PWS is no longer supported and if you want to develop any ASP then you must install IIS. So far as I can tell, Microsoft hasn’t been particularly forward in letting us know this, though.
Well, my laptop is only little and I just use it to update and test web pages locally prior to putting them back on the server in the office while I travel on the train etc. But no more! This gem means that to run ASP, I must install IIS and to do that I must run XP PRO. Maybe it stands for Professional Rip Off.
A Web search reveals that many other people have found the same problem. Some are trying to work round it by copying DLLs from friends’ servers to get IIS to run under XP Home – which seems pretty dangerous on several counts.
The only way I can see to solve the problem is to move to an alternative web server, many of which are free or shareware. Of course, they use different scripting languages, but most of these are just as simple once you are familiar with them (CGI/PERL/PHP).
Surely Microsoft must realise that to alienate the client base yet again is not the best way to keep existing customers or to attract future business. Many of the budding programmers of tomorrow use tools like PWS to cut their teeth on. It’s quick, easy and FREE. Now, though, they will have to use other systems and, in doing so, will create a skill set void around IIS.
Bill or Steve, if you are reading this, please reconsider and release a PWS XP that runs on all flavours of XP. Oh, and how about consulting people next time?
[Something you’d like to get off your chest? Email me (Robin Jones) at eo@iap.org.uk.]