Homepage: Carousel

[shawnthompson]

Seeing as though the Canada.ca Homepage no longer has a carousel, the GCWeb homepage template should be updated to match.

[EricDunsworth]

I don't know how practical that would be. From what I can tell, the Canada.ca home page's carousel appears to have been replaced with 4 identical figures that are all hidden by default. A WET 5.0 prototype (?) is being used to randomly unhide one of the figures when JavaScript is enabled.

Btw that setup isn't working properly in all of WET 4.0's modes. No figures are appearing at all in noscript and the WET 5.0 plugin isn't being disabled in basic HTML mode (even though plugins aren't supposed to run in that context).

None of the <img> elements in the figures contain alt attributes either. That doesn't fail HTML validation, but fails success criterion 1.1 in WCAG 2.0 (via failure technique F38).

[shawnthompson]

@duboisp Is this a WET plugin or a custom plugin for Canada.ca only? Shouldn't Canada.ca only be using WET?

[duboisp]

@shawnthompson thanks for notifying to update the GCWeb homepage template.

It was/is an experimental plugin only included in the canada.ca wet-boew MWS variant.

I will look on adding it to gcweb.

[EricDunsworth]

Is it wise to be testing out experimental prototypes of WET 5.0 plugins on prominent Canada.ca pages? Particularly if they haven't been reviewed by either the AWG nor the WET community in advance (AFAIK), aren't fully compatible with all of WET 4.0's modes and fail WCAG 2.0?

IMO it'd be more ideal to introduce a v5.0 branch into the wet-boew repo and initially create and refine those plugins from there. Then consider introducing them onto Canada.ca once they've matured.

[duboisp]

That feature was introduced before I join the team, I am aware of it but I don't know the full background in regard of it's testing.

Regarding the missing alt attribute, I will report it.

[duboisp]

I reported the missing alt attribut. It should be fixed soon. Thanks for finding this @EricDunsworth

[lisafast]

BTW, the original intent of this new "uncarousel" is that only a single image would be loaded on page load, to improve performance, rather than all 4 loading when only one will be displayed. Wish this was possible.

• Should absolutely have alt attributes! - Note I believe these will improve accessibility, too many blind participants got hung up on the play controls and general complexity of the previous carousel design

@EricDunsworth - while there were 4 identical images loading on the Canada.ca home page the week the uncarousel was launched, there are now 4 different images. The idea is to provide flexibility - they can load all 4 with one image when there is a big announcement, so that every visitor sees the same image, or load 4 different ones, or 2 different ones, which are randomly selected on page load.

• We do hope to replace all carousels (they are part of the theme page template) with uncarousels eventually.

[RobJohnston]

Instead of calling it an uncarousel, I often see such a thing referred to as a hero image.

[lisafast]

@RobJohnston True but possibly misleading in this case for people unfamiliar with that term because there are multiple images, and well, there is some sensitivity to the whole " hero" thing (speaking as a heroine ;) ) , since the government promotions presented there are about things like the new "tell us once service to keep your information up to date".

[BenTrem]

"Hero image" ... I like that. A lot.

Perhaps à propos: http://bentrem.net/html/ace/Ace-PanelSlider-ReSize-3.html Expanding image with mouse-over I think is very powerful. This is easily the most elegant I've seen.

p.s. apologies if this is entropic; I haven't synced with you and the project. Yet.