A platform for building spatially enabled rich internet applications.
Following Matt’s Post regarding Accessibility, we’re now able to demonstrate an example ResponseMX application which features accessible keyboard controls, screen reader prompts and scalable elements.
The page that it sits in has been creating using XHTML/CSS and validates to the current W3C standards.
You can access it here: www.dottedeyes.com/web_mapping/demos/accessible/
Birmingham Community Safety Partnership (BCSP) have been selected to deliver a presentation on the My Neighbourhood application at the National Crime Mapping Conference.
The website (designed from conception to completion by Dotted Eyes) will allow members of the public to access crime statistics via maps, graphs and tables, as well as contribute information back in the form of interactive surveys and polls.
It builds on the secure extranet system (COSMOS) that also uses ResponseMX. BSCP will also be talking about DDA Accessibility requirements, building on the recent work we’ve been doing with this.
Just a quick note on how MapXtreme Java MDFs hold a reference to a particular character in a font. We’ve just been creating an individual value thematic on a layer of points so that some of the features can be styled using bitmap symbols and some can use characters from the MapInfo Miscellaneous True Type Font. One of the symbols that we wanted to use (a bird 
) is outside the normal ASCII range (which includes numbers, lower and uppercase characters and common punctuation).
When you apply a rendition style to an MDF it is stored as an XML element which defines the font-family font-size etc. plus the position in the font that the character can be found at. For example if you wanted to a feature to be rendered as a exclamation mark (!) you might see:
<br />
<style fill-opacity="1.0" stroke-opacity="1.0" stroke-width="1.0" font-family="Arial" font-size="50.0" symbol-mode="font" symbol-foreground="black" symbol-foreground-opacity="1.0" symbol-background-opacity="1.0"><br />
<text>!</text><br />
</style>
However when you look at the style element for a symbol that is outside the normal ASCII range the text element contains a non printable character and if you make any modifications to the MDF by hand the symbol is not displayed. Luckily to get around this you can use a numeric entity reference containing the ASCII code of the character; therefore to render our bird symbol you can use:
<br />
<style fill-opacity="1.0" stroke-opacity="1.0" stroke-width="1.0" font-family="MapInfo Miscellaneous" font- symbol-mode="font" symbol-foreground="aqua" symbol-foreground-opacity="1.0" symbol-background-opacity="1.0"><br />
<text><span style="font-weight: bold">€<</span>/text><br />
</style><br />
The agenda covered a wide range of topics including a number of case studies of recently developed applications, a preview of the work contributing to both the next release (2.6) and version 3.0 and some more technical sessions focusing on data and configuration.Thanks to everyone that attended, if you didn’t make it then maybe next time.
