Accessibility

Hello all. I am a new face around here, with a background in accessibility compliance and testing. I thought I would pitch in to help make Drupal as accessible as possible.

I am starting by looking at the Accessibility Guidelines for Drupal 7: WCAG 2.0 & ATAG 1.0, but if anyone knows of an area with a more critical need for attention, please let me know.

Under the section "1.4.1 Use of Color (Level A)", there is an item with the following:

Color is not used as the sole method of conveying content or distinguishing visual elements. - Red * for mandatory fields

Me and quicksketch are discussing some accessibility enhancements to Imagefield over at http://drupal.org/node/193887 (ALT text optionally required unless the user checks off a "decorative" checkbox, longdesc support, limiting ALT text to 80 characters). It would be great to get some input from you guys.

Hi everybody,
As one of a BoF Accessibility participants on the last day of DrupalCon DC 2009, I decided to get involved and help out in what can be done to improve accessibility in Drupal. As a newbie, this is my very first post on this Accessibility Groups forum.

There are a couple of things (in order) that I'd like to share with you in what items can be implemented right away into Drupal. Right off the top of my head, of course.

From The American Foundation of the Blind (AFB):

• A Review of the Accessibility of Facebook
• Survey on Social Networking Sites

At the documentation sprint at DrupalCon D.C. , we began the Accessibility documentation pages. They are currently at: http://drupal.org/node/394094

There are a number of ways people can help with this documentation:

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Getting Drupal to emit screen-reader friendly dates is a pain in the butt. It can, however, be done. Here's a detailed account of my efforts on that score, complete with tests in two screen readers (including MP3s for your listening pleasure), some analysis, and a detailed walk through of customizing the code for a DATE element.

I'm using the Password Policy module to enforce strong passwords. When a user changes their password, the module displays a password strength indicator via Javascript. I'd like to add the ARIA live region role to the span that contains the strength indication and error message.

Hacking the Javascript is pretty simple. I'd like to consider the options for doing this the "best" way.

I made two small patches to D7 to improve the accessibility of the search form:

http://drupal.org/node/356359
http://drupal.org/node/368759

It's another small change for accessibility. I think this will help, but would appreciate feedback on these changes. Certainly it improves things with my tests using:

http://wave.webaim.org/

Mike

WebAIM has just published the initial results of its January 2009 survey of people who use screen readers and other forms of assistive technology (AT). Find the WebAIM survey's initial results here.

I have barely looked at this information, but a few points do jump out at me:

Would like to get some folks contributing to this checklist for Drupal Core. Would be nice if D7 was WCAG 2.0 compliant out of the box. We've certainly made some advances with D7, but we need to evaluate it!

Drupal Core Accessibility Guidelines

Because Drupal is a web content authoring tool it must also meet Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines.

Drupal Themeing Accessibility Guidelines

This is a great resource for Drupal Theming brought to you by the nice folks at WebAIM.

WCAG 2.0 Checklist

• Perceivable
• Operable
• Understandable
• Robust

IMPORTANT: The following is NOT WCAG 2.0. It is, however, a simple checklist that presents the principles and techniques of WCAG 2.0 in a more user-friendly, understandable format. The language has been significantly changed and simplified from the official WCAG 2.0 specification to make it more easily tested and verified for web pages. While this checklist may be very handy in pursuing accessibility and WCAG conformance, please reference WCAG 2.0 documentation to verify actual conformance.

I would really like to understand this issue better - http://drupal.org/node/58941

As Webchick says "If 1/50th of the people complaining that this isn't fixed yet actually put some energy into reading the copious documentation cross-linked here and creating said patch, this probably would've made it into Drupal 4.7."

So, I'd like some other opinions about the difference between:

Getting a Drupal 6 Site up to FAE Standards

FAE

This is a short talk I gave the other day. I'm looking for feedabck. code is at:

http://staff.ed.uiuc.edu/jbarclay/accessible/accessible.zip

and

http://staff.ed.uiuc.edu/jbarclay/accessible/fck_accessibility_tweaks.zip

UPDATE: I started at http://drupal.org/project/accessible - Johnbarclay

I use a simple little module I wrote called accessibile to help with accessibility. I'm attaching it and looking for feedback on the general approach as well as the details of it. Here is the gist of the module:

==================================================
This is a helper module to make creating accessible websites easier. It is intended to:

• add functionality to allow authors to class block headings as "offscreen"

I followed up on a bug report about accessibility issues and radio buttons. Created the patch and had it approved by the test bot and others that reviewed the code.

However I'm requesting support from the accessibility community to see if we can't bring it into Drupal 7 core.

Form labels for radio & checkbox(s) are not properly done with Drupal at the moment and don't follow WCAG 2.0 Guidelines.

In a recent WCAG 2.0 presentation I was attending it was stressed that websites should not be using the same text to link to different URL's. So, with a generic Drupal blog when the teaser node produces 10 or so "Read more", "Add new comment" or "Send to friend" links, each going to unique URLs for the corresponding post it becomes very difficult for screen readers to navigate.

In an accessibility blog post I wrote about quick accessibility enhancements, I described an easy way to make the Read more link more descriptive. I believe it's also got some both SEO & click through advantages too.

I Just submitted a patch for the Drupal eCommerce which included a localisation patch for Irish counties - so autocomplete forms work when a customer from the Island of Ireland is selecting their county (state).

This is by no means an official list. It's a list I compiled myself using the county codes from car registration plates as the basis.

If anyone knows of an official county code list for Ireland, please post a reply up here.

This issue cropped up recently (I am not sure if it has been discussed elsewhere or even resolved). If it has please let me know. With the advent of version 6 a couple of my vision impaired friends have told me they find it much more difficult to use blocks in version 6. This has resulted in some of them going back to using version 5.*. This issue concerns the keyboard accessibility of blocks. i believe there has been a move towards a "drag and drop" model with blocks when re-ordering page content.

Hello there,
If you or your organization is developing in Drupal, please list yourself here. The aim of this post is to prepare a list of the organizations which are working on Drupal CMS. Thus if we want to organize a major event like Drupalcon in India in future, it helps us a lot to co-ordinate between all the organizations developing in Drupal.

Thank you.
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How about organizing 'Drupalindia -0x' (x--year, of course!)
start listing yourself here, below this.
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Views Filters with Exposed Select Lists

Problem: Long lists in exposed filters require control key + multi-selects which are subject to keyboard errors.

Solution: Convert select lists to scrolled check box items for specific filters (not globally)

Some Possible Approaches:
irc:drupal-support 6/30/2008
[18:30] http://drupal.org/project/views_checkboxes
[18:31] I've tried this using phptemplate_form_alter in my template.php
[18:31] http://drupal.org/node/138374#comment-545078

Hi everybody

I run an Internet page for blind and otherwise visually impaired users and have some thoughts on making a talk (audio) support/dialogue feature. The most basic implementation could be as simple as a text chat, only using sound instead, of course.