Wednesday, July 27th, 2005
Ajax Shopping Cart: Progressive Enhancement
Category: Accessibility, Showcase
They have released an Ajaxian Shopping Cart which uses progressive enhancement.
Basically, fancy words to say that it still works if you aren’t able to do the JavaScript wonder, and doesn’t make screen readers cry (etc etc).
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.
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Can somebody provide a shopping cart sample code?
Thanks a lot
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the concept is very nice n useful