OpenConcept is committed to producing accessible websites for our clients. Our company is actively working to create a better world and working for to reduce the barriers to disabled people is something we've been able to contribute. The Internet is a vital way for people to learn & interact with friends, but also with organizations and government agencies that we all depend on. We realized that we could make a bigger impact to improve accessibility if we focused on building tools that improved the default level for a popular CMS.
Best Practices
We have built this site as a demonstration of what is possible with Drupal and also as a means to develop best practices for the community to consider. We have been actively pursuing the implementation of best practices for accessibility, although have not yet evaluated this site against WCAG 2.0 checklists. We are always evolving our approach & improving it so that we move closer to WCAG 2.0 AA or better.
Accessibility & Compliance
Accessibility isn't really about checklists, but rather about barriers to people in our communities. Although we have a great deal of respect for the WAI's guidelines we see them as being only part of our approach. We use automated testing tools like WebAIM's WAVE & FAE to quickly check our site on an ongoing basis. We encourage others to do this as well and send us feedback on ways we can improve. We also encourage people to write to us to inform us about barriers that they meet when accessing our site. The feedback form below will help us identify and fix the problem, but there are also good services like like Fix the Web.
Debated Options
Because we are involved in the broader web accessibility community, we are always re-considering the techniques used in this site. Presently, we have not enabled a text resizing widget on our site because we want to direct folks so that they learn how to use their browser. We have also decided not to implement access keys at this time because implementation has been too inconsistently applied at this point and we believe that they cause more problems than they solve. If you have strong opinions about this, please let us know.
Edgy New Tech
This site is built with Drupal but our implementation presents our users with HTML5, CSS3 and ARIA. Although widely supported by web browsers best practices have yet to be established for these new standards. We are confident that moving forward with this framework, built on Drupal 7, that we will make our site as universally accessible as possible. For more about our accessibility efforts, please refer to our accessibility blog.
We make mistakes though, so if there are ways that we could help eliminate barriers that are stopping you from using our site, please let us know. If you have problems accessing this form you can also send us an email or a message on Twitter.