"2) It’s not “shutting down” so much as it is being replaced by the existing
MetaCPAN search site. This is positive news about the future of Perl: an
older, less capable tool has been replaced"
metacpan.org has some disadvantages compared with search.cpan.org, and some
missing features, so it is not positive news for everybody.
Unlike search.cpan.org, metacpan doesn't use a heading for each record
found, so it is much harder to navigate among the found results when using a
screen reader.
Metacpan's interface is not as standard as search.cpan.org's interface.
After searching something and the results are shown, it is less intuitive
where begins the group of links for a record (module or distribution) and
where it ends, especially that the number of links differ among different
modules/distributions found.
If the interface is made intuitive just by using different colors for
different things or by a special positioning on site, these things doesn't
met the web accessibility guidelines, and are useless for the blind.
These disadvantages are there for many years, there is no contact data where
they can be reported easy, the soft behind metacpan is open source so if
somebody don't like something might be invited to make the improvements
himself, with the efforts involved, and this while there is a more
accessible solution already that don't need any effort to be used.
Plus that with its current non-intuitive interface where the results found
are not similar, it could be even harder to do the necessary improvements.
Which of the links in a result should appear as heading, so the screen
reader users should be able to jump among easier? The distribution name
appears in all results, but it is usually not very relevant. More relevant
are the module names, but for each record there may be one or more modules
displayed and it would be not good to mark them all as headings, because
they all point to the same distribution.
On search.cpan.org it was a very good solution to be able to choose to
display each module as a distinct record, or each distribution as a distinct
record, depending on what you need.
In the pages that describe the modules, the text is badly formatted to look
nicer just for the sighted, but it is hard to understand by the blind.
Here is how a description text appears like for screen readers:
package
link MyKwikiFormatter
;
use
link base
'link CGI::Kwiki::Formatter'
;
... while it should be looking like:
package MyKwikiFormatter;
use base 'CGI::Kwiki::Formatter';
This is because some parts of the text like module names appear as links,
which are read by the screen reader as text on distinct lines, with the word
"link" before them.
And there are also other smaller things that metacpan to look worse, for
example for the <h1> elements for NAME, DESCRIPTION etc, instead to appear
just a single time as links in a level 1 heading, they appear twice and they
are read like:
#NAME
NAME
even if I don't know why, because #NAME appears just as a value of the href
attribute, but who knows what are doing the JS and CSS code...
--Octavian
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