Things we don’t do with SMS messages any more:
- put paragraphs in them (we use `<br>` tags instead, to allow for
multiple linebreaks)
- pick them using radio buttons
- render the template’s name as part of the template
- render the phone number that the message will be sent from as part of
the template
You might need to scroll this page quite a lot to see where a
placeholder appears in your template – especially if you have a long
email or letter.
One of the things I’m trying to stop happening so much is a lot of
scrolling back and forth. This would happen if you were scrolling down
to see the placeholder, then back up to fill in its value.
So this commit makes the textbox ‘sticky’, ie it always stays at the top
of the viewport, even when you scroll down. This lets you see the
placeholder and the textbox side by side, no matter how long the
template is.
The code to do this mostly comes from the GOV.UK Frontend Toolkit
(documented here: d9489a9870/docs/javascript.md (stick-at-top-when-scrolling)).
I had to add some extra CSS to make it look good when it overlaps the
content of the page, which the GOV.UK Frontend Toolkit implementation
doesn’t really anticipate.
Because the email addresses can get pretty long, and have no spaces in
them, they sometimes break out of their containing box. This looks messy
and causes horizontal scrolling.
We’ve seen in research a user getting stuck playing with the
scheduler. They picked a day, but then didn’t want to choose one of the
options for that day. There’s no way to do this except pick a day and
then un-pick it.
What they ended up doing was clicking the grey back button, which took
them back to the previous page, making them upload their file again.
This commit adds a ‘back’ link for the scheduler. ‘Back’ seems like
sensible naming because that’s the thing that the user tried to click,
and the UI of a link matches the thing they clicked to get into this
situation.
The delete link was designed to be used with a button, where it needs
some padding to separate it from the button.
We now have a case where it’s being used without an accompanying button,
so we need a variation without that padding.
Not sure what about the new radios is causing this, but they no longer
expand the size of the container, causing an overlap.
The fixed height was originally for performance reasons, but removing
it doesn’t seem to cause the page to jump around on load, so I think
it’s OK.
The visual appearance of radio and checkbox form inputs changed in
GOV.UK Elements here:
https://github.com/alphagov/govuk_elements/pull/296
This was subsequently reimplemented with different markup and no
Javascript here:
https://github.com/alphagov/govuk_elements/pull/406
This has meant making the following changes to our app:
- changing the markup in our radio/checkbox macros to match the example
markup given by GOV.UK Elements
- removing the previous Javascript file because it’s no longer needed to
make the radios appear visual selected
- making the buttons on the scheduled job picker look like links,
because the grey button style looked weird with the new radio buttons
- SMS message preview gets slightly wider so it lines up with a 4/8
column
- Edit email box gets wider to match more closely the width of the
previewed and delivered emails
Making the navigation narrower means that we have more space on every
page. So on pages where we had to use 16px type just to fit stuff on the
page we can now bump the type size up to something less miserly. This is
mainly the team and settings pages.
We still need to use 16px on pages which list notifications or previews
of spreadsheets, because we’re still trying to fit a lot of information
onto these pages, so every little space-saving helps.
The email looks a lot like the normal content of a page (black on white
text, same font, rendered by the browser). It needed differentiating
visually.
This commit adds a border and spacing around the email to separate it
from the things on the page that you’re supposed to be interacting with.
This isn’t needed any more because:
- we’re moving toward not clicking the letter to preview it, so there’s
no need for a (not very intuitive) indication that it’s clickable
- we’re not showing letter templates on the same page as email and text
message templates, so there’s less need to visually differentiate them
(which also worked to limited effect)
Previously we only showed the top half of a letter template, in order
to conserve space and fit multiple letter templates on one page. Now
that we have only one template per page there is space to spare. So
this commit changes the letter preview to show the full height of the
A4 page.
This also requires increasing the resolution at which the preview is
rendered so that it still looks clean at the bigger size.
Letter templates have (or will have) multiple different editable
regions. I think that the most intuitive way for this to work is to have
- an edit link for each of these areas
- positioned next to the thing to be edited
Again, this isn’t fully hooked up, but since no-one is using letters
live yet this is a good way of getting research feedback and pointing
towards where we want the feature to go.
Uses percentages for the positioning so that the alignment is maintained
on mobile.
Not everyone knows how to use `ctrl` + `f`, and it’s not scoped to
just the list of templates.
The template you want to work with is often not the first one in the
list, but ordering by created at is useful for other reasons (mainly
around first time use).
This commit adds a find as you type control which aims to give users a
quick way of getting to the template they want to work with.
In HTML you generally can’t nest an inline level element inside a block
level one, if you want your HTML to validate.
There were a couple of places where we were using a `<span>` as a
containing element:
- inside every table cell (think we inherited this from Digital
Marketplace)
- in the ‘pill’ navigation component for the selected tab
This meant that when we put components like big number inside these,
the resulting HTML was invalid, because big number is built with a bunch
of `<div>`s, which are block level.
This commit removes the use of a `<span>` tag in these places, and
replaces it with a `<div>`. Nesting block level elements in fine in
HTML.
Currently it’s not possible for a screen reader user to know which
financial year they’re looking at. From the accessibility report:
> The financial year links are contained in a navigation region -
> tabbing or arrowing through only reads out the links, not the main
> information of "2016 to 2017 financial year" - that information is
> vital for understanding the page content.
This problem also applies to other pages which use the `pill` component,
which is effectively tabbed navigation (that reloads the page rather
than showing or hiding content on the page).
There are specific ARIA attributes that can be used to mark up a
navigation as being tabbed. This commit:
- adds those attributes
- makes the selected ‘tab’ visible to screenreaders and keyboard
focusable
- adds a visual focus indicator to the selected tab
- adds `id`s to the parts of the page that are controlled by the tabs so
that they are labelled as such
This also means changing the pill component from being a `<nav>` to a
`<ul>` because `tablist` is not a valid `role` for a `nav`.
Mostly follows the example here:
http://accessibility.athena-ict.com/aria/examples/tabpanel2.shtml
The heading structure of most pages is incorrect (`<h2>` followed by
`<h1>`). The `<h1>` indicates the main purpose of the page, the service
name (currently the first `<h2>`) doesn't need to be a heading.
> If both sections of the page have errors and the page is submitted,
> focus moves to the mobile numbers section so screen reader users may
> not be aware of preceding errors - focus should move to a dedicated
> error summary at the top of the page.
Right now we use Javascript to focus the first error on a page (if any
errors are found). This commit adds more JS to then focus the error
summary, if there is one on the page. So this is where the focus will
rest.
It also makes some modifications to the ‘dangerous’ banner to make it
focusable, and to visually indicate that it is focused.
This copies what the other GaaP components will be doing for their
product pages.
The SASS and HTML is taken from here:
f05ca1fb71/source/stylesheets/modules/_breadcrumbs.scss
Only changes I’ve made are:
- making the file paths work with our build pipeline
Changes to our code to accomodate this are:
- putting the padding on the product page `<h1>` not its container
- moving the hero image accordingly so that it lines up
- making the `<main>` element on the product page into an anchor so that
the breadcrumb can link to it – screenreader will then announce the
link as “GOV.UK Notify, same page”
The ticks and crosses on the team page are served bigger than actual
size (128×128px). They are then resized using CSS3 `background-size`
to their displayed size (19px).
The reason for doing this is so they display crisply on retina screens.
IE8 doesn’t support `background-size` (see
http://caniuse.com/#feat=background-img-opts). This means that the ticks
and crosses get show at their original size (way too big).
This commit adds resized versions of the ticks and crosses which are
then served to these older browsers only.
We grey-out the non-current step in the tour so the user knows whether
they’re at step 1, 2, or 3.
This is done using CSS opacity.
IE8 doesn’t support the standard CSS opacity syntax. But it does support
the weird, old, Microsoft-specific `filter:` syntax. So this commit:
- makes the greying out a class rather than an inline style, to reduce
duplication
- adds the filter syntax so the greying out works in IE8
We use flexbox to lay out the counts of sending/delivered/failed on the
activity and job pages. flexbox makes the best use of the space when
the numbers can be significantly different widths (eg 0 sending, 5000
delivered).
Flexbox was only supported from IE 11 onwards [1]. And since we were
setting the `display` property of the individual numbers to `block` they
were rendering one-per-line on browsers that don’t support flexbox.
This commit changes these items to be floated and a predefined width. In
browsers that support it, flexbox seems to override these hard-coded
widths. It’s not quite as good as the flexbox solution because:
- it doesn’t adjust the widths in the nice way that flexbox does
- it’s hard-coded to expect 4 items (we don’t have this component with
any other number of items at the moment, so it won’t actually break
anything)
But it’s pretty much OK because:
- it’s a lot better than the before
- IE 8 and 9 combined only make up 5% of our users, and this will be a
declining number
- polyfilling flexbox would mean using Javascript, and we don’t serve
working Javacript to IE 8 users anyway
1. http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox
Skewing the letter results in a bunch of slightly-off-vertical diagonal
lines. This is a bit visually jarring when everything else on the page
lines up vertically or horizontally.
This commit makes the bottom half of the letter straight, by offsetting
it instead of transforming it. The ‘fold’ now has depth, so it has to
be drawn in somehow, that’s what the `:before` is doing.
This might be taking the skeumorphism too far (especially with the
animation). But it’s a way of indicating that the letter will ‘unfold’
if you click it. Might revert this, but let’s see how it feels.
Users might wonder why they can’t see the whole letter. We should make
it obvious that it’s because the letter is folded. We can use CSS to
draw the bottom half of the page behind the top half. With some
transforms this makes it look like the letter is actually folded.
It’s a bit skeumorphic but:
- I think it achives the desired effect
- the way we show emails and text messages is also mildly skeuomorphic
The letter previews take up too much space on the page (more than a
typical email or text message). This means that users have to scroll too
much.
When we send the real letters they will be folded in half to fit in the
envelope.
So by showing the letter previews on the page cropped to half the
letter’s height:
- it reduces the need for scrolling
- it gives an accurate preview of how the letter will be delivered
This is acheived without hard-coding any heights by using a little-known
quirk of CSS, namely that padding set as a percentage is calculated from
the width of the element, even for top/bottom padding. This means that
we can always set the ratio of the displayed letter to be A4 folded in
half – the square root of 2.
The PDF preview is all good, but it’s hard, finickeity and feels dirty
to embed a PDF in a web page. It’s a more natural thing to embed an
image in a web page.
So this commit adds another endpoint to return an image of a letter
template. It generates this image from the PDF preview, so the stack
looks like:
1. `template.png` (generated in admin)
2. `template.pdf` (generated in admin)
3. HTML preview (generated by a `Renderer` in utils)
4. `Template` instance
5. serialised template from API
6. Template stored in database
The library used to convert the PDF to an image is Wand[1], which binds
to ImageMagick underneath. So in order to get this working locally on a
Mac you will probably need to do:
`brew install imagemagick ghostscript cairo pango`.
To get it working on Ubuntu/EC2 is an exercise left to the reader…
1. http://docs.wand-py.org/en/0.4.4/
This copies the style that Tim and Stephen have been developing for all
product pages.
It also pulls out the CSS for this into its own file, so that it could
potentially be reused.
