About

Table of Contents

The ReefChat project began after a talk with Aaron Leventhal about creating an accessible Dojo Chat Widget. I began development in mid 2006 and eventually found out about Charles Chen who was working on a screen reader plugin for Fire Fox called Fire Vox. We decided work together and developed the first accessible Ajax Chat.

Special thanks to the Mozilla Foundation and the ATRC SNOW project for funding much of the development for ReefChat.

Also a special thanks to Charles Silverman from for feature suggestions and UI testing. ReefChat has been tested in both Mozilla FireFox 2 and Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

Road Map

Architectural Changes

  1. Code to Unit Tests (debugging features - needs thought)
  2. Refactoring to be OO JS
  3. Administration Features - save and clear a chat transcript
  4. Multiple Chat Channels - varying access

Accessibility & WAI ARIA

  1. Group multiple chat messages from same user - less info to AT
  2. Slider widget for refresh speed of chat

Chat Log

  1. Log Features - pause/resume chat, (on/off)status area, time centered every 2 minutes
  2. Preferences (Generalized Settings with a link to customize: default screen reader, defaul low vision ...)

Chat Messages

  1. Format messages (add message numbers, typing notification)
  2. Bookmark chat messages & filtering