Thanks to everyone who came to the Oxford Drupal Users Group meeting last night, and a big thanks to Collin and WebCurl for being such great hosts.

I made a few notes on our discussions which I will summarise here for posterity.

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Ubercart

Eldred had some questions about Ubercart.

Video tutorials.
He wanted to find a way to sell access to video tutorials on an Ubercart site he was developing.  Specifically, he wanted to show a 30 second intro video on the product node, then upon successful purchase, be able to display the full video to the customer.  There was some discussion about field permissions and uc_roles to sell access to a particular video field, but this allow the site to sell access to all video tutorials or none - not allow the purchase of individual videos. Another suggestion was to sell the videos as file downloads, which can be done with Ubercart out of the box. 

A second question was how to recommend similar products in an Amazon "people who bought this also bought these" style. 

Apache SOLR was mentioned as it provides a block of similar content - but this would involve setting up solr, which is extra work. http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr

Relevant content (taxomony based recommendations) http://drupal.org/project/relevant_content

Ubercart Products Recommender was also suggested: http://drupal.org/project/uc_rec

Drupal Commerce

New Drupal Commerce module was mentioned as a possible replacement for Ubercart in Drupal 7 with many potential improvements over Ubercart.

http://www.commerceguys.com/resources/articles/ubercart-drupal-commerce-1
http://www.drupalcommerce.org/ 
http://drupal.org/project/commerce 

Accessibility

Several people were interested in advice about developing a Drupal site with accessibility in mind.  

Access keys: access keys can allow the keyboard to be used to access particular links. There is a list of standard key assignments published by the UK government http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog/index.php/uk-gov-access-keys/

However, it was suggested that not many people know about these standards and so they may be of limited use.

Screen readers: visually impaired users often use screen readers to access website content, so what level of testing should we do with screen readers?

I mentioned a podcast in which Katherine Lynch had some useful suggestions on testing your site for accessibility: http://www.lullabot.com/podcasts/drupal-voices-99-katherine-lynch-on-acc...

And whil we're there, there's also a discussion with Everet Zufelt, the Drupal 7 core accessibility maintainer http://www.lullabot.com/podcasts/drupal-voices-98-everett-zufelt-on-acce...

Generally, users of screen readers don't browse a site in the same way as fully sighted users - it was suggested that it is useful to watch videos of screen-reader users accessing a site... (maybe on YouTube?)

It is always important to allow people to skip navigation.

Good tools:

• firevox - http://www.firevox.clcworld.net/
• fangs - http://sourceforge.net/projects/fangs/
• thunder (Windows only)- http://www.screenreader.net/

Theme switching

For sites that require alternate styles (eg. high contrast) there are various options: http://drupal.org/project/switchtheme
http://drupal.org/project/styleswitcher 

On problem with such approaches is that for anonymous users switching themes will not work as expected with caching enabled.

Sugested solutions:

• Use the domain access module to display different themes on different sub domains: http://drupal.org/project/domain
• Customise switchtheme module to add a parameter to the URL path for different themes, potentially allowing Drupal to cache paths to alternate styles independently

Text size

Discussion about allowing users to change the size of the text on the site raised some interesting suggestions.

Some clients ask for buttons on the site to resize text, such as http://drupal.org/project/textsize

It was suggested by several people that these are not the best solution. The suggestion is that all modern browsers allow the user to increase the text size, and it is better to educate the site users about how to do this on any site they visit, rather than providing a block that clutters up every page. 

"Don't put anything on your site that doesn't need to be there."

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." (Quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

Images: All images should have alt tags, but decorative images within the content should leave alt tags empty as they do not convey any information.

educate the user: General move towards eduction the user on 

• how to use their operating system's accessibility features 
  http://www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility/ 
• how to use their browsers accessibility features
  http://www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility/mac/seeing/text/browser/firefox2.shtml

Other modules and themes to help with accessibility

• semantic views to render cleaner output from views http://drupal.org/project/semanticviews
• using clean base themes:
• zen - http://drupal.org/project/zen
• mothership: http://drupal.org/project/mothership (many people preferred mothership to zen for clean code)
  really strips out code, but need to be careful about the amount of code it strips out - things can disappear!
• genisis: http://drupal.org/project/genesis (big on accessibility)

Newsletters

• Simplenews (Drupal module) 
  http://drupal.org/project/simplenews
• PHPlist (Open source project) 
  http://www.phplist.com/
• Compaign Monitor (paid service) 
  http://www.campaignmonitor.com/ 
  http://drupal.org/project/campaignmonitor 
• Mail Chimp (Good)
  http://www.mailchimp.com/ 
• Constant Contact (one person suggested to be wary as the servers had potentially been blacklisted as spam)
  http://www.constantcontact.com/ 
• EMF:
  http://drupal.org/project/emf
  integrates with paid services

if you haven't tried... 
(recommended module to try if you're not already using them) 

• http://drupal.org/project/filter_perms
• http://drupal.org/project/permission_select
• http://drupal.org/project/vertical_tabs
• http://drupal.org/project/itweak_upload
• http://drupal.org/project/imagebrowser

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The next OXDUG meeting will probably be in September.