Grand Union

What exactly is this thread for? Any comments, suggestions, criticisms and feedback that you have on the new BA Forum Dashboard.

Fire away!

muscat

Shouldn't your links be shown as Gold cards?? Can't imagine there's any blue card holders here

BOH

Oy. There are a few of us

geo-womble

are the links supposed to show as pictures or something within the thread? all i can see is text which makes little sense as to what it is referring to until i click on it.

Prospero

You will need to enable images to see this content. This can be done by adjusting the settings in your user profile.

Click on the yellow and orange MyFlyerTalk icon at the top right corner of this page; then click Edit Options (you'll find this link under Settings and Options in the side menu). Then, in the third pane down, check the Show Images control button.

If that doesn't work, please let me know

Stez

I'm a bit old fashioned and liked the index list in the Ultimate BA Guide, rather than searching through a list of icons to find the topic of interest. Especially useful on connections where even a 14.4 kbps dialup would seem like lightning.

But a ^ ^ ^ to clearing up the stickies-cluster on the forum though

ginger50

Good effort, it must have been pretty time consuming sorting through the jumble - thank you ^^^

David-A

Guys, firstly thank you for all the effort on the content and on the organisation of it. However, I have to say you seem to be going far too far down the images road.

From an accessibility point of view, both users with sight issues but also for search and autotranslation reasons, and non traidtional desktop devices, this should REALLY be text and not an image:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/13303024-post3.html

Same with the lounge info. Pictures are great, but not for text.

While I might have a few further suggestions on organisation, I'll wait until your 2011 setup is totally finish to confirm. But seriously, watch the accessibility issue.

Yahillwe

Grand Union... wonderful job, for a second there I thought that my eyesight was really getting worse because many of the threads were gone...


Now, since you are such a great organizer, when do you want to come and do my house?

Genius1

Great work, and I like it much better than the previous jumble of stickies ^

geo-womble

ok, got the images sorted. but it does take a while to load over my clunky internet connection. I agree with David-A about the accessability of the images as text is so much easier when on a slow connection or a small screen.

jonnye

Wow! Very impressive - looks like you've put alot of time and effort into producing this. ^^^

AJLondon

Massive improvement in the new version and the widgets really help de-clutter and make for a very easy to access format. Most impressive. ^ ^

Prospero

Tough feedback but most welcome. Your points about universal access, auto-translation, and search are interesting. All valid.

In our attempt to add clarity and simplify navigation we've really stretched the bounds of BB functionality as it currently stands. I can say that with all conviction having studied the BB handbook in order to test the more complex coding required to get the widgets to perform as we want them to. We'd like to explore the use of widgets further and I think the BA Lounge Database might be a great candidate for this.

Now that we're masters in widget creation, and the use of bitmap images perhaps we can turn our attention to best practices, allowing this format to be applied with greater precision. Depending on what the overall feedback tells us, it is possible to convert the existing lounge database into a more conventional, discussion based format spread across individual lounge threads (incorporating the useful data as text in the primer). The application of widgets may be a better way of providing an overview, possibly replacing the present lounge cards. As in the Dashboard thread, widgets will function as launchers to the respective lounge threads which is entirely compatible with our aims to improve navigation. The following sample image gives a visual of what I think is possible:





Your point about accessibility and the current presentation of our forum acronyms is also valid and this is something we can address. Thank you again for highlighting this.

David-A

Prospero, thanks for your reply.

Firstly I should state that I can totally see the limitations that you are encountering that are realted to the forum nature of the platform!

[Indeed, myself I'd make the case to the owners for the shifting of the FT guides in each section out of the forum area of FT, and into a restricted edit Wiki or restricted edit pure html.]

[Or alternativly push the locked guides into a subsection of the BA section - similar to the Swiss subsection within M&M, but will all locked threads in a maintainted order.]

Secondly, there are a number of things which reguarly crop up on FT where diagrams and pictures would be a huge improvement. Pictures of things can indeed be worth a thousand words. (And I can think of a few things that BA.com could explain SO much better with diagrams!)

However, using images for text is just wrong - for so, so, many reasons (as we have covered).

Now, sight accessibility people will see no problem with small quantities of text (headings, etc) being images - providing there is decent ALT text provided. [But FT does NOT seem to support ALT text at all with the IMG tag?] And inline images for text is not at all a solution for people using auto-transaltion etc (it also makes it impossible to copy and past extracts, etc, etc). And again, without ALT text, it is dificult for search, etc.

[If guide threads were to be taken outside the limitations of this forum software, then there are ways around all these problems - CSS, etc. Even within a very restricted sitewide page template a great guide could be built.]

But if stuck inside, then I don't think doing things such as the lounge cards AS IMAGES is a good idea at all. Pictures of the lounges - an excellent idea and improvement (alongside text).
And also consistant templates for core information in relation to each lounge - an excellent step forward - even if we don't know some of it for some lounges. But text should be done as text.

Sadly, given that we do have plenty of tabular information (and not for presenation reasons!) FT does not seem to support true tables within posts either.

So regarding your example, FT doesn't seem to support ALT text for images.
Now if you are envisaging thouse 'widget' images being links, they would need to be separate images, as I can't see a way to support either a client or server side imagemap setup (and an image map would be wrong in accessiblity terms).
So rather than single postage stamp sized images as the links, I have to say I would prefer and consider to be better (and that is better for all, including full English speaking, no eyesight issues, normal desktop users) a text list of links:
London Heathrow:
Terminal 5
Terminal 3
London Gatwick
London City
Jersey
....
etc.

[Also, I'd use links taking the users and their view point to the specific post (#post123) shown within the thread, rather than deep links to specific posts as individual pages themselves (as some sections of FT use in their guides) - levaing the post in its context let new users see where (in the big higherarchy) you have referred them, and where it fits in.]

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Sorry if this sounds like lots of complaints, it is just that I first noticed that acronyms page had been done as an image today. But the same point stands with the lounge cards, etc.

As I said, I see totally the limitations you are hitting - and there are countless things improved with images and diagrams AS WELL, but using images for text is not one of them.