Tag: pitfall

Common Pitfalls – Alt Text

Recently we updated our link checking script to hunt for some common mistakes in image alt text.

As you may recall from your initial Drupal training, alt text is very important for accessibility, as it’s the text that’s read to the visually impaired to describe what’s in the image. Close your eyes for a second and pretend whatever you put in the alt text is being read to you. Is what’s being read so short that it’s meaningless? So long that you get bored just listening to it? Does it repeat something that you already say in the text, making it redundant?

But we’re interested in even worse problems today. Sometimes people put in alt text that doesn’t event attempt to describe the image. For example, some people use the file name as the alt text. Like this:

<img src="/dog.png" alt="dog.png">

If you were using a screen reader, your software would get to that image and read you “dog dot p n g”, which is summarily unhelpful. Reading the file name won’t help anyone better understand what’s in that image. Also unhelpful is this:

<img src="/dog.png" alt="goldenRetrieverPuppy">

which we haven’t seen recently, but has come up in the past. That’d just cause the program to attempt to read goldenRetrieverPuppy as a word, possibly completely unintelligibly.

And then some people are just lazy:

<img src="/dog.png" alt="picture">

Completely unhelpful.

Remember, for us (as it should be for everyone) being accessible isn’t optional. Starting today, we’ll be scanning for these errors automatically, and emailing content editors that need to touch up their alt tags a bit.

 

Common Pitfall – Links

During our last deployment, we stumbled across a couple of errors our content editors made. When we talked to them about it, we learned that often, the editors weren’t even aware there was an issue. So I’d like to bring special attention to one of those errors that is easy to prevent, and helps make the website work better for everyone.

Links

There’s just a little bit of technical background you should be aware of. In Drupal, every page has a node number – an internal number that Drupal uses to identify your page, independent of the page title or URL. For example, our contact page, at http://www.lanecc.edu/contact, is node 105, which you can see for yourself just by clicking those links.

The URL for your page is based on two things: the ‘chunk’ your page is assigned to, and the title you’ve given your page. For example, the page http://www.lanecc.edu/math/division-projects is in the “Math” chunk, with the page title “Division Projects”. When that page title changes – say to just “projects”, then the URL of that page will also change. The new url will be www.lanecc.edu/math/projects.

Why does this matter? Well, a number of our content editors are adding links to their pages by simply pasting a link on their page. Drupal, being a friendly, helpful CMS, automatically turns URLs into links. All is well and good until a page title changes and the URL changes. Suddenly, the pasted link isn’t to the right URL any more.

The fix is to use the LinkIt module. You might recognize it as the “Insert Link” button, from this image on our help documentation, and from the WYSIWYG editor:

The Drupal editing interfaceWhen you click that “Insert Link” button, you’re given a little popup window, where you can search for content and select the page you want to link to:

The Drupal TinyMCE interfaceThere’s two input boxes in that white box. If you’re linking to an internal page, start typing in the top box, and Drupal will search page titles for you, and let you select the page you’re looking for. If you’re linking to an external (not on Drupal) page, paste the URL in the bottom box, and then just say insert – there’s nothing to search for.

Again, why does this matter? Because Drupal knows the node numbers of pages, and instead of linking to lanecc.edu/contact, it will link to lanecc.edu/node/105. When someone visits the contact page, Drupal looks up what the URL is for node 105, and gives the visitor a link to the right place. In other words, you don’t need to worry about updating internal links – we’ll take care of it for you.

Unfortunately, because not using LinkIt has resulted in a number of preventable 404 errors, we’re going to make some changes to the Drupal interface to make sure they don’t continue to cause problems. Soon, Drupal will no longer automatically link up URLs that you paste into the page – you’ll need to use LinkIt if you want them to work. And pasting a www.lanecc.edu link into the bottom box of LinkIt won’t work either – we’ve disabled that as well. *

To help get the entire site back to where it should be, we’ll be checking the database over the next few weeks and helping editors that seem to be struggling. Don’t worry – we’re just trying to make sure that all the links on the site always work. And if you are having trouble, check our help pages (Drupal authentication required), and don’t hesitate to contact someone on the web team.

* There’s also some room for User Interface improvement here, and we’re working on it, but it involves some tricky changes to some code that we didn’t write, and unfortunately user interface improvements often can’t be at the top of our priority list. But we won’t forget about this one.