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.
Previously they were relative (ie percentages). This made sure that they
worked on mobile, when the letter might be narrower.
However it broke when the preview was more than one page, because
13% of the height of 2 pages is different to 13% of the height of one
pages.
This commit changes the positions to be pixel values, which match the
calculated percentage values when the preview is one page.
It’s uneven ever since we upgraded the toolkit. Guess it’s probably
allowing space for an arrow image. But I don’t like the arrow image
because it looks like it’s pointing at the ‘or sign in’ link.
So this commit overrides the button’s default spacing.
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.
Not sure why we were doing this. But as part of the Elements upgrade
our back buttons got bigger (because they weren’t constrained by the
line in our `app.scss`) but any green submit buttons stayed smaller in
height, so didn’t line up.
This commit removes the override, so all buttons have the size that
Elements intended.
The Elements CSS was making the `label` and `input` of disabled radio
buttons `opacity: 0.5`. This was resulting in text that was:
- too pale, especially where we were nesting 16px ‘hint’ text inside the
label
- waaaay too pale when inside a link inside the label
This commit overrides elements to dim the disabled radio button by
making it’s text colour grey, rather than making the whole thing
semi-transparent.
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
Not sure how these got out of line (maybe when we brought the date into
the left-hand text area). But this commit updates the percentages to
match the comments.
This is so it’s clear from the position of the link which part of the
letter you’re editing.
The textbox we use for editing letters is the same size as that for
email and text messages.
This is problematic because:
- it feels quite cramped – letters will often be longer than emails or
text messages
- it has a narrower line length than the printed letters (which is a
constant, unlike for emails and text messages)
The printed letters have a line length of 137.5mm and a font size of
12.5pt.
137.5mm = 5.41 inches = 389.7pt line length
389.7pt/12.5pt = 31.8em
So we could make the box 31.8em wide, but then it wouldn’t align to our
grid.
Our grid splits the page into quarters initially because this is how
wide the navigation is. So this means that we can use grid units of
1/multiples of four, eg 1/4, 1/8, 1/12, 1/16, etc. But the smaller the
denominator, the less effective the grid will be – it gets closer to no
grid at all.
After having a play around, 5/8 of the page looks closest to 31.8em.
Since the main column of the page is 3/4, we set a column of 5/6 width
inside that, which equals 5/8 of the total page.
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.
Like the template ID this is an infrequently-used action on a template
and doesn’t belong at the same level as ‘Upload recipients’ or
‘Send yourself’ a test. We don’t think it’s information that’s useful to
working out which template you want to interact with, so it shouldn’t be
on the choose template page any more.
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.
Our CSS adjusts the spacing for the first `.heading-large` on the page
so that it aligns with the navigation. This doesn’t work when something
else comes first on the page, like a notification banner.
But since we only ever user `.heading-large` for the `<h1>`, and there
should only be one `<h1>` on the page we can just change the spacing
for _all_ `<h1>`s.
The message text in our previous illustration was white on light blue,
which didn’t meet WCAG AA colour contrast. WCAG AA requires a contrast
ratio of 4.5:1. The text in our image was only 3.8:1.
The text in this new image has a contrast ratio of 19.8:1, so easily
passes WCAG AAA.
Required a slight tweak to the positioning of the image because it’s
dimensions weren’t exactly the same as the previous one.
The bars were sitting in a table cell with some right padding, so they
never extended all the way to the right. Making it right-aligned removes
this padding, then setting the text to left aligned keeps things looking
the same.
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.
