I’ve been working together with Message on a couple of different projects recently. Some of the more exciting work has involved building a new back end for the award-winning Rapha website.
The new revision of the website launched today. Like I said, most of the changes are on the server side but I did take the opportunity to add one or two enhancements to the front end.
If you’re in the market for some cycling gear, head on over to products section of the site. Perhaps I can interest you in a nice jersey. Select the one you want and add it to your basket. You’ll see that the shopping cart updates without refreshing the page.
Yes folks, it’s yet another sighting of Ajax in the wild. It’s also an example of the kind of progressive enhancement I’ve been banging on about. The functionality was already in place using old-fashioned form submissions. I just used JavaScript to intercept the default action and update just part of the page instead. I did the same thing on the separate shopping basket page.
It’s working pretty nicely but it’s not without its problems, namely accessibility issues. When a portion of the page is updated, there’s nothing to indicate that to a screen reader. I have the same problem with Adactio Elsewhere.
Now, this is where Derek’s modest proposal comes into play. Because the functionality has been added in such a way as to guarantee that it will degrade gracefully, then encouraging users of screen readers to actually disable scripting is not the same as giving them a reduced experience… quite the opposite in fact.