Accessibility

I have been loosely involved in web development for 12 years. Over the course of this time I lost my sight due to a degenerative eye disease. When I started using a screen-reader I realized that navigating the web can be very difficult for persons with disabilities, and was somewhat disturbed with all of the coding mistakes that I had made over the years that may have contributed to this problem.

Next Conference Call

Monday July 27th,
2pm Eastern Time (UTC -05:00)

If you want to participate please email everett@openconcept.ca

Agenda

• Accessibility standards
  • WCAG 2.0 (W3C recommendation)
  • ATAG 2.0 (W3C draft recommendation)
• Assistive technologies: how backwards compatible should Drupal 7 be?
• Theme Changes
  • Use of headings
  • Visibility / off-screen content
  • Invisible text within links
  • Addition of optional "skip" block in themes
  • ARIA 1.0 (W3C draft recommendation)
• JQuery UI
• Open Drupal 7 accessibility issues

Hi,

I'm a multimedia developer (I can do a bit of everything but always have to learn more to complete a task), I have experience in developing HTML, CSS, Javascript, Actionscript 2 moving to 3 now and a very brief understanding of PHP.

I've recently started learning how to implement Drupal as I have undertaken the development of a website for a public body that requires a CMS and they legally need the site to comply to WCAG Double A standards for site users but not contributors or adminstrators.

Just saw this accessibility evaluation of Recovery.gov by Jim Thatcher. Recovery.gov is the highest profile Drupal government site in North America and so it is an interesting view of how this government which is committed to accessibility & open government implements this great CMS.

Posted up a suggestion on the Theme & Design track for DCParis about including some web accessibility material.

I think a lot of what we're working on/discussing here could be gelled into a solid panel discussion or presentation directly applicable to Drupal themers and the T&D track looks really interesting already.

-Kate

Here at CSU Monterey Bay we have a mandate from our Chancellor's office that all web content be accessible by 2010. This date is fast approaching, but we are moving towards a model where we automatically approve content for accessibility before it goes out to the web.

I recently had someone ask me about Drupal's compliance with a few standards and thought this group would be a great place to start some discussion.

• Section 508 compliance
• WAI (W3C Web Accessibility Initiative) compliance

I haven't done any formal research on the topic, but my impression is that Drupal core is compliant with all of these standards. I believe that as we head off into contributed modules/themes they quickly deviate from these standards.

Lee has asked for some docs for the Best Practices section of the Theming Guide (http://drupal.org/node/341707).

I made a start a couple of weeks ago but it would be good to get some feedback on what we think should go into this.

I'm tending to think it should be pretty high level, but with enough depth and examples so a themer can pretty much get the basics right without having to go to an external resource, but with links to external resources with additional information.

I am searching for a WYSIWYG editor, which is build using the ATAG standards in mind.
Does any of you know an editor who complies to these standards?

Modules that add access keys ("shortcut keys", "hotkeys") to various elements of the page, for improved usability:

Setting Up a Screen Reader Test Environment
http://www.iheni.com/screen-reader-testing/

How to Use NVDA and Firefox to Test Your Web Pages for Accessibility
http://www.marcozehe.de/articles/how-to-use-nvda-and-firefox-to-test-you...

WAI-ARIA role support - How the Browsers Stack Up
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=114

Thanks,
Mike

There's been some really great work done looking at usability within Drupal - http://www.d7ux.org/

However, I do think that it is important to start talking about accessibility with any new visions of how content is going to be created and sites are going to be administered.

Hello,

I want to add images to my site, and am concerned about the accessibility issues.
I have done a lot of reading on the subject, and to say the least I am a little confused as how to proceed.
Is there a recommended solution ie what modules I should use and how to implement them with accessibility in mind?

TYIA

I'd like to post a focus on Date/Calendar modules accessibility.
Following mgifford's comment on a Calendar issue regarding accessibility I'm posting here some issues for that modules that would need some love/reviews from users who cares about accessibility.

I'm talking about:
- Calendar: Accessible calendar navigation thoughts providing a "caption" for calendar table
- Date: More accessible date navigation with prev/next and month link-titles

Hi all,
Drupal is mentioned in an interesting blog post at Standards Schmandards,
Contributing WAI-ARIA landmark roles to open source CMS themes .

In discussing the question of inserting a tabindex to create an auto focus for certain pages (/user*, /node/add*, node/*/edit) so that the cursor is always sitting in the first field of the event in question, v suggested that this was more of a usability issue than an accessibility one. I recorded a friend with mobility challenges trying to create an account for those who want some understanding of how important this could be.

So I was reading Practical Accessibility Tips with WCAG 2.0

Always Use Explicit Labels is in 7 core now and has been backported ot 6.

The use the tabindex attribute is also quite scarce. Think it only shows up in the user.module as an attribute added to the form:

Right now we're indicating Required Fields using:

Well, there are labels for pages like the permission page - /admin/user/permissions

I was looking over this critique from Juice Studio about Drupal's Accessibility.

And labels are there, but it's all code, so really not sure how useful it is. We'd probably want each box to be populated by a label with the role instead of the number of the role & so that a screen reader could properly explain what a particular checkbox is about:

First, a bit of good news, we got another accessibility feature into core - http://drupal.org/node/356359

Still have a lot to do before this list is addressed though - http://drupal.org/node/364629

Next, over the weekend I ran a good friend of mine through a quick usability test of Drupal 7. He was a good enough sport to let me tape it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyIHtNHYroM