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.

Summary of Accomplishments

We didn't solve the world's accessibility problems, but we were able to come to consensus regarding more Drupal 7 accessibility issues than I thought possible on a single conference call. Issues that were addressed included:

• Accessibility standards to be supported in Drupal 7
• How backward compatible Drupal 7 should be for assistive technology
• Hiding content for screen-reader users
• The proper use of headings h1 ... h6
• The use of ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) attributes
• Dates for future metings

Moving Forward

There is still work to be done in ensuring that Drupal 7 is a truely accessible CMS. There are a number of outstanding Drupal 7 accessibility issues to be worked through. As someone who works full-time on improving the accessibility of Drupal 7 core I would love to have all of the comments possible to ensure that the solutions that the community is working on are as good as they can be, and that they are committed into core.

We will be having two more Drupal 7 Accessibility Taskforce meetings in August. The meetings are currently scheduled for:

• August 10 at 11:00am (EST -05:00UTC)
• August 24 at 11:00am (EST -05:00UTC)

Conclusion

We had a great call and accomplished a great deal, but there is more to be done. I would encourage everyone interested to dive into the accessibility issue queue and to post as many comments as you have time for. We would also love it if you would join us for our follow-up meetings in August where we will be discussing open accessibility issues in detail.

For the full summary of the meeting please visit D7 Accessibility Taskforce Meeting Summary (July 27, 2009).