Really like this article: An In Depth Analysis of HTML5 Multimedia and Accessibility.

Last May I gave a talk at Guelph's 2011 Accessibility Conference. I wanted to raise awareness about aspects of the Drupal 7 accessibility improvements could be used as an example. The video was recorded by the University & I was sent a copy of it so that I could upload it here. I do think that the university may also upload a copy at some point, but there were delays and I had ideas within the presentation that I wanted to share.

I was sent a 187meg Windows Media Video (WMV) file from Patricia Shaver (University of Guelph staff) and wanted to display it in native HTML5 so I used the free Miro Video Converter so that I could convert it into a modern web format. One of the tricks however with HMTL5 is that there is no single flash video replacement tool out there, there is WebM (video/webm .webm), h.264 (video/mp4 .mp4) & Theora (video/ogg .ogv). Each format is better for a slightly different browser and fortunately MediaElement.js was created to help make this easier. Previously I'd used VIDEO for Everybody which also has a Drupal module.

I had a great exchange with John Dyer about some accessibility issues we ran into in our initial testing and he was quick to address the identified problems. I had wanted to use some Google API to provide auto-captioning but the best option I could find was uploading it to YouTube. Unfortunately, the video was too long so that wasn't an option either.

The team at OpenConcept would like to wish our clients, our suppliers, our partners & contributors all the best in 2012.  

It's been an exciting year for us with lots of great changes and a few new members in our team.  

Since we've been very involved in Drupal 7 Core development over the last number of years we have been quite happy to see the improvements in Drupal 7. It's getting much easier for everyone to start working with this code base now that more modules have been upgraded.  We've also started working on Drupal 8 now, even though it's release certainly won't happen until 2013.  

Earlier this month we organized an Accessibility Unconference that brought together over 100 accessibility professionals from as far away as Montreal & Toronto.  We were happy to be able to showcase the Drupal WET Distribution that we have been supporting at this event.  

It's been a busy year with our team participating in DrupalCon Chicago & London as well as DrupalCamp Montreal. 

I was pointed to this great resource on Plains Cree (nêhiyawêwin) links but it still doesn't have much information about presenting this language on the web.

Since hearing the story about the creation of Cree & Inuit syllabics, I've been interested in how colonization introduced written language to an oral culture. Since working on several Arabic/Hebrew/Farsi sites over the years, I've been curious as to how this applies to the web.  Being a unilingual person, I can't do more than look at the characters in any of these languages and I certainly have no education in linguistics.  However, I find the challenge of implementing aboriginal languages on the Internet to be quite a fascinating one. 

Cree is the most widely spoken native language in Canada and it's a people that span much of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and the Northwest Territories. However, I was surprised to see how little content I could find on the Web that was written in Cree.  Much of what was available was presented either as images or through Flash, neither of which can be copied, easily searched and certainly would be inaccessible to assistive technologies. The lack of examples to learn from certainly made this exploration more difficult. 

I do think that Movember's really hit a critical mass this year and this is the first year that OpenConcept's team has participated. It's a goofy thing to do with a group of men.  One thing I can say for sure, everyone seems to have an opinion about mustaches. It's been a significant shift for some of us as two of our team shaved off their beards to begin November 1st clean shaven. Fortunately, November's been a pretty warm month so far.

Our 'stache team is Jesse, Jason, Pawel, Eddie, Dutchy & myself. There are many other Drupal developers who have signed on as well Drupal 7 Accessibility Maintainer Everett Zufelt, long time Drupal greats like Boris Mann, other Drupal shops like Affinity Bridge, and best of all Dries & Acquia. This is a fun campaign that has certainly captured the attention of a lot of people and those behind it need your support $$.

Funds raised in Canada go to both Prostate Cancer Canada & the Movember Foundation and all to projects which seem to focus on research about curing cancer. I'd like to see this money be used to do more than just research a cure.  It should be supporting groups like the Prostate Cancer Canada Network Ottawa (a great Drupal 7 site btw) that are working to support survirors of prostate cancer and their families. I'd also like to see funding go to the research and advocacy for the causes of cancer. We live in an age where there known carcinogens which are still being added to our environment and new chemicals are being introduced every year without proper testing. The fight for the cure should not be preceeding the investigation about the cause. 

However, the call "to change the face of men's health" is really quite brilliant on a number of levels.  Men really haven't been raised to make our health a priority. Most of us, and I'm no exception, haven't gone for a physical for years, so finding a way to encourage and reward men for having an annual health check is a great thing.

OpenConcept has been participating working in the work of building a Drupal theme for the Treasury Board Secretariat's Common Look & Feel (CLF) for a number of years now.  We started distributing one in 2008 based on the Zen theme & Drupal 6.  It was pretty simple and relied on a great many modules to be downloaded & configured before it would work as expected.  We didn't get many contributions to improve the theme after providing it to a number of departments we and releasing it on IRCan, so we didn't invest much more in it.  At the very least it needed an install profile to allow the basic configurations to be set up so that it would be easier to get started.  

Then the CLF Office brought us in to look at the Web Experience Toolkit (WET). Admittedly, at first I wasn't a big fan, but the big picture initially presented by the CLF Office has become much more realistic in the last few months. A great deal of work has gone into improving & testing the code presented by WET on IRCan.  I love both that this framework is "Unless otherwise noted, computer program source code of the Web Experience Toolkit (WET) iscovered under Crown Copyright, Government of Canada, and is distributed under the MIT License." I think it's equally brialliant that the team behind this is reaching out to the Government of Ontario, Australia & is actively working to collaborate with other organizations to strengthen this framework. 

Recently as we've been working on enhancements to Drupal 8, we run into several situations where we are looking at the jQuery library.  Drupal's been including the free software jQuery for the last two releases and are using it more and more as it evolves. We were hoping we'd be able to simply leverage a solid accessible jQuery UI element rather than have to continue to enhance our own javascript widgets.  

jQuery UI 1.8 has an autocomplete widget in it so why don't we just use this rather than re-invent the wheel for Drupal 8.  Unfortunately based on some quick testing by Everett Zufelt the autocomplete widget wasn't as accessible as what we have implemented in Drupal 7. At the writing of this post there are nearly 200,000 websites that report running Drupal 7 and are benefiting from the enhancements we've made. Investing in Drupal core is already removing barriers for millions of people on live websites. jQuery improvements will have an even bigger impact. 

Now ideally we'd have lots of resources put into central libraries like jQuery because when these core projects get enhanced, everyone who uses them benefits.  It just makes so much sense to invest limited accessibility funding into the projects which will have the biggest bang.  Just take a look at some of these jQuery powered sites and projects. Just having Drupal and WordPress using them means that by default it's being used by a large percentage of the web.  

Now there have been attempts in the past to improve the accessibility of jQuery & related widgets.  The Paciello Group (TPG) developed this library of accessible jQuery widgets through funding by AOL and AEGIS.  There is a similar initiative that's being spearheaded by the Government of Canada to better integrate accessible jQuery widgets for their Web Experience Toolkit. jQuery is the recommended javascript library for the implementation of the federal government's Common Look & Feel.  All Government of Canada sites are required to be WCAG 2.0 AA compliant by the summer of 2013, so improving jQuery's accessibility is critical for government. These are both good initiatives, but I haven't seen evidence of the work moving upstream and being adopted by the jQuery community. 

Last year I was approached by Jennison Asuncion who has been instigating a number of innovative grassroots efforts to get people talking about accessibility issues. I was impressed by the successes in DC, London, Montreal and Boston and it seemed like a nice challenge to take on in Canada's capital. These cities all organized a second conference this year and now Toronto joined in as well.

The plan was to initially have the unconference in the spring of 2011, but unfortunately there was a surprise election so we decided to postpone it till the fall. We're happy to announce that Ottawa's first Accessibility Unconference will take place in our City Hall on December 2nd.

I've had help from Adam Spencer (AccessibilIT) and Denis Boudreau (AccessibilitéWeb) in maintaining this initiative over the last year and have generously been offered use of several rooms by the City of Ottawa to hold the event. 

It's important to note that there is considerable controversy around whether or not fonts can provide any benefit for people with dyslexia. In 6 Surprising Bad Practices That Hurt Dyslexic Users there is a list of some basic things that can be done which are more likely to improve readability. I can see means which a Drupal module could be built to strip out unneeded spaces which impact the river effect, eliminate double spacing after periods, allow for an adjustable background, warn about long unbroken paragraphs. With many WYSIWYG editors it is possible to remove or filter out justified text & italics already. Choosing a serif font for the body of your message is clear, but inside that there is a huge variety of options.

A recommended book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention from @lizditz who has been having a very good discussion with me on & @Diane_Duff Twitter.

Abelardo Gonzalez created a font licensed under the creative commons which he made available via Dafont.

I've been trying to learn more about how to support people with dyslexia and so have been reading up about good font options. There are a few which have been recognized as being better than others to help people distinguish the difference between b's & d's. The most interesting work I've seen on this is from Christian Boer of Studiostudio who created the font Dyslexie. The focus of most fonts geared for dyslexic people has been print and sadly there still aren't any strong, reliable options for the web.

Historically, any interesting fonts would have needed to be embedded within images or flash files because there were less than 10 fonts that you could rely on your users having installed on their computer. Using Flash or images to convey text always complicates things for accessibility, plus maintaining a library of old image files was also a pain. This has changed with modern web browsers, and there are now a number of ways to introduce more fonts to the web.

Wanted to point folks to Karl Groves' article Do Accessibility Testing First, I really like his idea of automated nightly testing for accessibility. I also wanted to acknowledge that this is more of an accessibility evaluation tactic than methodology.

I just got word that the Web Accessibility Initiative's is starting up a WCAG 2.0 Evaluation Methodology Task Force to provide more comprehensive guidance on evaluating web accessibility.  This is great, not only because the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (published in December 2008) aren't written for the average developer, but also because it should make it easier to build sites with fewer barriers for users. If the projected timelines are accurate, the first draft of the Evaluation Methodology will be developed at about the same time that all new Government of Ontario websites will need to be WCAG 2.0 AA compliant. It won't be 3 to 9 months after that however before the final drafts are available for public review.  

I have a lot of respect for the process of developing standards and know I don't have the patience for it.  I'd like to have the time to participate in the WAI Interest Group, but although the discussions are public and searchable, it isn't as easy to get involved as it is with the Drupal community where it is possible to follow specific issues over time. There are a lot of interesting people who have contributed a lot of time to shaping the W3C's standards, I do find that the focus is now too much on evaluating individual sites and not enough on leveraging the ecosystems that are used to build them. There also isn't enough discussion of free online tools that can do so much to improve a site's accessibility. 

Acknowledge What Already Exists

Most websites are built today with libraries of code that very much shape their accessibility.  Problems within a CMS or Javascript library will affect the accessibility of the sites that use them. If the communities behind these projects are actively working for improved accessibility, many problems can be avoided.  We've made some great enhancements to Drupal 7's accessibility, and although it's true that each of those could be reverted in a particular site's implementation, it's unlikely that a developer would take the time to do this.  Evaluating a Drupal 7 site's accessibility should be fundamentally different than a custom built website, because the framework that is actively being reviewed for accessibility improvements.  {C}

More and more our browsers know where we are and can help simplify our decisions. Many campaigns ask for your postal code as a simple means to help gain some location awareness about your visitors, however, this is rarely accurate on a smart phone and never convenient. As we've already blogged HTML5 begins to address this problem by providing a better means for dealing with location. There's a lot of new ways that sites are going begin to take advantage of this information.

One way that I've wanted to explore was with political campaigns. Most of us spend a great deal of our time in the our ridings and know which electoral district we are in even if we don't vote. However, it would be useful many times to be able to simply pick up your smart phone and figure out which riding you happen to be standing in. Say if there's a dangerous pot hole you wanted to report to a municipal councillor, but were outside of your riding. Or you wanted to tell a member of parliament where you worked that it is important to you to fund public transit. Whatever it is, if you can make it easier to put people in touch with those who are elected representatives for that region they will be more interested in your communications.

Now Vote.ca has a great system that allows you to find Canadian federal as well as some provincial & municipal electoral districts. They also have an API that allows for a machine operable way to do this, so our computers can do some work for us. I haven't spent any time verifying this data or comparing it with the postal code to riding data that we have purchased through Statistics Canada, but in my limited tests it seems to work well. It is a free rate limited service (10 requests per minute/IP address) but it should be workable for many Canadian campaigns.

I wanted to simply blend in some of the HTML5 geolocation information with this API to show quickly how powerful this framework is. I saw being able to further extend it so that we could access the name & contact information that we have on file for members of parliament through our Make the Change service. We have a similar API that we wrote a while back to interact with riding data. I saw this all being done with the jQuery library which has a lot of great client side tools for manipulating data. Using HTML5, geodata & mashing that up with two different API's to produce politically useful information just seemed to good to pass up.