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By dreftymac on
Background:
Drupal 6 (and presumably seven and beyond) makes increasing use of the "drag and drop" modality for ordering sequences of items. This happens, for example, when you want to arrange CCK fields into field groups via the Drupal user interface. Although this is a very nice feature, this presents problems for people who need to use assistive technologies -- consider, for example, people with physical disabilities who have difficulty using the mouse.
Problem:
The "drag and drop" features of Drupal don't seem work very well with screen automation tools, and it appears certain features within Drupal are becoming unavailable to people who cannot readily make use of the mouse.
Question:
For the parts of Drupal that are being changed to "drag and drop" ordering, is there a way to use an *alternative* to drag and drop for people who depend on browser automation tools, and those who cannot use the mouse to do basic data input into the browser?
If there are no plans to keep the "non drag and drop" options available to such users, does anyone have a solution for automating drag and drop operations in the GUI in a way that works *reliably* and without reliance on a mouse? Any input or suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Comments
Drap&drop behaviour is added
Drap&drop behaviour is added by using unobstrusive javascript, meaning that if the user does not have javascript, it will fall back on other methods to provide the same functionality. If you disable javascript in your browser and go to admin/build/block for instance, you'll see that you see the weight fields you may know from Drupal 5. This means that you could also use javascript to completely disable drag and drop at the click of a button. Alternatively, you can also have both (d&d en weight fields) at the same time. The drag and drop script simply hides the weight fields (style="display: none"), but you can make them re-appear just as easy. I just did a quick test, it's doesn't seem to be a problem to use d&d and weights at the same time.
I'd like to completely disable D&D
On some of my smaller sites I like Drag and Drop "ordering".
However, I have sites with over 250 blocks to be ordered - Mostly RSS feeds from external sites.
I don't want to disable Javascript to Administer this site, as we need it for other functions and use it on other sites in the multisite. In addition we have content creators that will be particularly frustrated with the time it takes to "convert" all these weights to drag and drop.
Is there a function being planned to add a disable switch to this feature that doesn't require the loss of functionality that Javascript provides on many sites?
Thanks
Get It Done!
Asking the obvious questions.