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.

I have been involved in web accessibility for a little over a year now during which time I worked with several organizations, including the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto. I have recently accepted a web developer role at OpenConcept Consulting Inc.. Over the next few months I will be focusing my energy on promoting and improving the accessibility of Drupal 7.

Drupal 7 Accessibility

As it stands Drupal 7 is reasonably accessible, not that there aren't a number of issues to take care of. I truely believe that Drupal can quickly become an incredibly accessible CMS if the community gets involved.

Past Improvements to Drupal 7 Accessibility

There have been a number of recent accessibility improvements made to Drupal 7. Included in this list are:

• Remove title attribute from node titles in Garland
• More flexible theme_feed_icon() without breaking current behavior
• Add title to path form item
• Search Form has Accessibility Issues According to WAVE & FAE

Outstanding Drupal 7 Accessibility Issues

There are a number of outstanding Drupal 7 accessibility issues that have been reported, but not resolved.

Some of these issues are minor, but some are, like Defining System-Wide Approaches to Remove, Make Invisible & Push Content Off-screen with CSS are fundamental to solving other accessibility issues.

A Roadmap for Drupal Accessibility

There are three steps involved in ensuring Drupal's accessibility:

1. Defining the scope of accessibility:
   1. Which standards will accessibility be tested against? (I would recommend WCAG 2.0, ATAG 2.0 and draft recommendation ARIA 1.0 from the W3C http://www.w3.org/WAI/)
   2. How backwards compatible does accessibility need to be? (I.e. will Drupal support 8, 5, or 3 year old assistive technology?)
2. Making sure that any user interface component committed to core does not violate the standards in step 1.
3. Fixing outstanding accessibility issues in the code.

It is all obviously far more complicated than this, the community needs to decide which level of WCAG 2.0 conformance it desires, certain user interface patches may need to be committed without accessibility to keep the ball rolling while core systems, (e.g. the forms API and the fields API, which may need accessibility work themselves) evolve. But, I do believe that generally speaking the three steps above will help to rapidly move Drupal's accessibility in the right direction.

Call to Action

What can the community do to move Drupal accessibility in the right direction?

First, you can report accessibility problems with the Drupal Issue Tracker.

Second, you can follow outstanding Drupal 7 accessibility issues and join the Drupal accessibility group.

Third, you can create or review patches submitted to the community by others.

With all of the community working together we can make Drupal 7 an incredibly accessible CMS!