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Building an accessible forum

Many websites have a forum (also known as a “bulletin board”, “discussion board” or “message board”). Forums are one of the most popular and commonly-used types of social networking system. How does one set about making a forum that’s accessible? You’ll find some of the answer in this article.

Recently I’ve been considering how organizations for the disabled and people with long-term medical conditions could use software to better help their clients. One of the most important roles for these organizations is in putting individuals in touch with one another. Communication between fellow-sufferers is often much more effective in providing vital information than that between patient and professional.

An obvious tool for this type of interaction is a website forum. However, much of the generally-available forum software is not designed with accessibility in mind, so it’s not ideal for people who have eyesight, cognitive, or motor problems. How then, to build an accessible forum?

Vanilla, please

Having evaluated a number of bulletin board packages, including PunBB, MiniBB and bbpress, I’ve settled on Vanilla as that best suited to building an accessible forum. The principal reason for choosing it is that Vanilla is designed with customisation in mind; most comparable packages have a limited capacity for customisation unless you edit the code, which then makes keeping up with fixes very difficult.

Even so, Vanilla still exhibits a number of the flaws commonly found in such packages, including:

• Tiny fixed-size default fonts. There has been a discussion on the Vanilla support forum regarding font size which indicates how unaware many users are of this problem. The majority of those responding seem to think that if they are personally able to read some text then its size must be generally acceptable.
• Low contrast colors. For maximum accessibility text contrast should be in the medium-to-high range. Ideally the user should have a choice of contrast levels.
• Unfriendly terminology. For example, to hide entries belonging to a particular subject area the user has to use a link labelled ‘Block Category’.

Fortunately all these can be fixed.

Enhancing Vanilla for usability

I’ve started work on an extension for Vanilla which provides user-selectable stylesheets. This will mean the user will be able to select a text size dynamically as well as have a choice of contrast.

I also plan to simplify the language of the user interface to make it more like plain English and to address some other usability issues. For example, some active elements (ie, hyperlinks) of the user interface are visually indistinguishable from inactive ones until you hover the mouse over them.

Once I have got my extensions into usable form, I’ll make them available to other Vanilla users through their extensions library. I’ll also create a ready-built version of Vanilla which will be downloadable directly from this site, and I’ll also be offering services around it, including installation, customisation and hosting.

Edit. Sadly, Vanilla has proved unfit for this purpose. See the next post on this journal for details.