Everett's blog

Yesterday was the third Drupal 7 accessibility taskforce meeting, and the final meeting before code freeze. With September 1 just around the corner the Drupal accessibility community would like to reach out the the broader community for some additional help during this busy time to get as many accessibility improvements into Drupal 7 core as possible.

Introduction

I have been encouraged by the increased participation in the Drupal 7 accessibility issue queue in the past few weeks. There are still a number of outstanding issues that are fundamental to improving the accessibility of Drupal 7. Some of these issues can be dealt with after code freeze, others need to be dealt with before.

I believe that Drupal accessibility has to be adopted and fostered at the grassroots level.  Hopefully after code freeze some additional accessibility documentation can be added to Drupal.org and the documentation that is currently on the site can be reordered to make it more useful.  I believe that clear and thorough documentation will lower the barrier for entry into the Drupal accessibility arena, making it easier for community members to get involved who currently don't know where to start.

On July 27, 2009, Laura Wesley wrote a very good article on Why government websites (still) suck. In her article, Laura explains a number of the practical and systemic causes for the slow pace of improvements to government sites. Laura also provides a list of six federal government sites, expanded to seven in the comments to her article, whose developers and designers she commends for the work they have done.

Wondering how accessible the sites that Laura commends are, I performed a very preliminary accessibility audit, from the perspective of a blind screen-reader user on two of the sites, and included one site of my own. The three sites are Health Canada, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and Copyright Consultations (the site I chose).

It is important to note that the following web-site evaluations are by no means exhaustive, and were not performed against any particular accessibility guideline. The following comments are reflective of my own user experience of the sites using the Firefox 3.5.2 web-browser and the JAWS 10.0.1154 screen-reader.

This morning I had the opportunity to evaluate the accessibility of the d7ux administration theme (Information Architecture) "Seven". My evaluation was not intended to be thorough, or to identify every web accessibility conformance problem, but to get a feel for what the theme will be like for screen-reader users, and what broad accessibility issues need to be addressed.

I must say that from the perspective of a Drupal administrator and screen-reader user that I believe that the theme will be seen as a useful and welcome addition to Drupal 7 by many users. Although there are clearly many accessibility issues to tidy up before Seven is truly accessible, I was surprised at how easy it was to get accustomed to using the iframe "Overlay" panel which appears at the bottom of the page, (if navigated in DOM order).

Today was an exciting day, the first Drupal 7 Accessibility Taskforce Meeting. Don't worry if you weren't able to join us, there are two more meetings scheduled in August.

I am overwhelmingly encouraged by the number of people who were able to take time from their busy schedules to help with brainstorming about some of the important steps involved in ensuring that Drupal 7 is the world's most accessible content management system (CMS). We had at least nine participants and were able to come to consensus on many fundamental issues regarding the accessibility of Drupal 7.

Recognizing the need to unify the presentation of governmental information on the web, the Government of Canada has developed CLF 2.0 (Common Look and Feel for the Internet 2.0). Part 2 of CLF 2.0 is the Standard on the Accessibility, Interoperability and Usability of Web Sites. The context for the CLF accessibility standard is that:

Canadians have the right to obtain information and services from Government of Canada Web sites regardless of the technologies they use. The key to effective implementation of universal accessibility lies in designing sites to serve the widest possible audience and the broadest possible range of hardware and software platforms, from adaptive technologies to emerging technologies. (CLF 2.0 Part 2)

I want to take a moment to introduce myself and to share my thoughts on Drupal 7 accessibility.

Introduction

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.

In a multilingual country like Canada, one concern for site developers is how to deal with multilingual site content. The creation of content on the page level is often performed by someone "authorized" to create content, where there is often an option to identify the language of the page. The chief language concern faced by site developers is how to deal with comments that can be submitted by "unauthorized" users in languages other than the primary language of the site.

Web Accessibility