OpenConcept is a Silver sponsor for FLOSS Summer Camp 2009 and will be presenting on accessibility issues and getting open source into Government. There are some other great speakers too, so please consider signing up.
The sessions I've proposed are:
Getting open source in Government (focusing on LAMP + Drupal)
Many people in government are just now to come to terms with the fact that open source is here to stay. One recent example is from PWGSC who in January put out a RFI to ask for input into a policy on government
procurement of no fee licensed software. The IRCAN initiative is another
great example of government agencies creating spaces to use and get involved with open source in order to do a better job. There is still a considerable amount of fear, uncertainty & doubt around though which is discouraging
adoption.
Some of the approaches that are useful to promote open source in government include, establishing precedent, describing good practices, but also talking about the values of merit based participation, cooperation with and standards based development which fit nicely with the public service.
Open source is already being widely used in government (almost half of servers I surveyed), so there is already a precedent. The processes behind supporting a centralized CMS like Drupal are going to be more secure than present practices (which involve nearly 20 million of individual dynamic web files according to Google). Existing open source communities already have expertise in accessible issues and are willing to share resources.
OpenConcept is working with several government departments to implement Drupal based solutions and has been able to share solutions to reduce costs and increase the deliverables.
Enhancing Accessibility in Drupal's CMS
Drupal is a leading open source content management platform and is already very standards compliant out of the box. Given this, many accessibility challenges are already met, however it is a complex and changing target and with the recent release of WCAG 2.0 there are many additional challenges that websites will need to embrace to become more accessible to people with disabilities. Given the rising number of people with accessibility challenges and the increasing importance of the web as a means of interacting with society, it is not surprising that there are new legal and financial incentives to make sites more accessible to everyone. Designing for screen readers is becoming more important, but there are different conventions that need to be implemented to allow non-sighted people to easily navigate the site. The proper use of alt tags is the widest
understood issue, but there are many other techniques that are as important, some of which can be coded into the default code of Drupal.
Openconcept has been involved in testing & pushing Drupal 7 (the development version) to be more accessible out of the box. By doing so we hope to make many more websites accessible by default. In working with an open source community on this issue we are able to engage with a wide group of users and developers to test solutions, find best practices and promote better practices. The open source community is well suited for the challenges of accessibility issues because the cost of proper implementation for most other software solutions is just too high. The talk will touch on some of the approaches we've taken to improving accessibility in future versions of Drupal and hopefully
provide some insights into other projects as well.
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