Drupal 7

Drupal 7 Accessibility Podcast Transcript

mgifford — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:14:03 -0500

I was listening to a podcast by AbilityNet in the UK the other day and liked what they were doing so I sent them a note on Twitter suggesting that their community might find the developments in Drupal interesting. I got into a conversation with them and ended up producing an MP3 with the following introduction to Drupal 7. After Drupal 7 is released we'll have to do a piece highlighting all the pieces that got in, but for now this is a good introduction.

Looking at the right end of the problem

The Internet is an increasingly important tool for citizens around the world. There are millions of websites and most of them have challenges for people with disabilities. In seeking to resolve this problem, the majority of efforts have focused on education and site specific enhancements. Although both of these are important, for widespread adoption the default needs to be that sites simply are more accessible from the start. In a world where most websites are produced by some form of content management system, there is an opportunity to focus on these core tools rather than on the individual sites that result from them.

OpenConcept Consulting is a Drupal development shop and an active member of the free software community. We saw an opportunity to influence one of the largest open source content management systems on the Internet. Knowing that we could introduce best practices to this code base, we began hunting for accessibility challenges. Making Drupal's code more accessible would mean that thousands of sites would become better without even being aware of it.

Starting small and learning

I first became interested in accessibility through my friends, some of which are heavily involved in the disability rights community. I have grown to appreciate many of the larger political struggles that they are fighting for. Despite this my involvement in web accessibility is still quite new. I only really started looking at this issue in 2008 by investigating issues with Drupal 6's themes & modules. I had some early successes that were applied to Drupal 6 and spent a lot of time learning about challenges that people face using the web. I've learned that there are many perspectives on web accessibility and how much old outdated content on this topic is still sitting on the Internet. I've also been able to reach out to many other Drupal developers and we have built up a small community to discuss, evaluate & propose solutions.

Taking on the challenge of addressing Drupal 7

It became clear though, that for any deeper changes to be made they had to be done in the development version of Drupal. Early in 2009 we looked ahead at Drupal 7's code freeze in the fall and saw that there was a window to bring more accessibility into this great CMS. As part of this process we hired Everett Zufelt, a blind web developer, to work on evaluating Drupal 7 full time. In working through installation, administration, debugging & development, we were able to propose a long list of issues & patches for improvement. We also worked with the core developers to increase understanding about accessibility issues and why they are important to the whole Drupal project. Fortunately Drupal's accessibility community was able to raise the profile of this issue and we have seen accessibility rise to one of the core evaluation criteria for Drupal 7 along with usability, performance and security.

Lists of enhancements

In the past year the following enhancements have been built into Drupal 7:

Skip to main content has been brought into core themes
The installation progress bar has been enhanced by adding an ARIA live region
Administrative content & user filters have been cleaned up
New features like the administration toolbar have been reviewed and enhanced
The sortable table header is more accessible
and Headers have been added to pagination links, navigation lists, and breadcrumbs
other changes have been introduced and more are still being reviewed

It's a long journey

Unfortunately, although we've made a number of important changes in the core of Drupal 7, there is still a great deal more work to do. There will be thousands of modules developed for Drupal 7, any of which could degrade the accessibility of an individual site. A theme or module developed without attention to accessibility can undo much of the hard work that has gone into this initiative. There will need to be continued evaluation and education with designers & developers in the Drupal community. Fortunately, there are a lot of people interested in doing this work, presenting at Drupal Conferences, organizing sessions at DrupalCamps or just posting issues when problems arise.

None of the enhancements that I've talked about could have been made without a supportive developer community and several key individuals which have contributed considerable time and expertise over the last year.

We hope you try Drupal 7 in 2010 when the stable version is finally released. For more information see http://groups.drupal.org/accessibility

Fields in Core

ethan — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:56:27 -0400

One of the more interesting DrupalCon DC sessions from my perspective was one describing the in-progress core Fields module. It is heavily based on CCK and will replace CCK in Drupal 7. The development is ongoing and has benefited from a number of recent code sprints.

I'm excited about this module for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it will allow fields to be added to any object- not just nodes. This includes Users, Nodes, Comments, data pulled from outside sources - whatever. Needless to say this is going to be very useful, potentially replacing modules like Profile with core functionality.

This is done through some carefully thought-out APIs that will once again change how custom field types are created, though hopefully for the better. According to the presentation (found below) it's a return to the data level/GUI level pattern found in D5 but departed from in D6. Probably the very best part, however, is that the API documentation will be included in core and will thus be accessible.

It also occurs to me that this prepares Drupal in some small way for the semantic web - part of so-called Web 3.0 - with the ability to annotate incoming data with useful data fields. Speculative at this point to be sure, but that's how I imagine it.

Finally, something not expanded on greatly in the presentation, the field CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) API. It allows for fields to be added programmatically, something only possible previously through awkward macros. This is awesome for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that modules can now leverage previously written field types, reducing development time and increasing configurability to the end user. That's cool. I envision some sort of Views-like 'suggested' content types that are configurable yet retain all the aspects that allow the contrib module to do its work.

An example of this might be a mapping module that uses a geographical data field; up to now the contrib module would have to supply the GUI for inputting geographical information on a node, along with all the database interactions to store the data. It might give us input widget options, if the developer is inclined. If things work the way I imagine, the developer of the module would simply require a particular field type to be present in an object, any object - in this case one that stores geographical data - and would relinquish responsibility for inputting and storing that data. This means we could plug in any input widget we wanted, and boom, the module is far more useful. I can't tell you the number of times a contrib module has provided the exact features I've needed, but the interface isn't appropriate for the situation.

Please keep in mind that this is my vision and I have no idea at this point whether this might happen. I'm definitely going to following this story for D7.

Accessibility Discussions at DrupalCon

mgifford — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:15:06 -0400

I've been trying to lead the charge on accessibility issues with Drupal 7 leading up to DrupalCon DC. As Dries outlined in his keynote, we've got until Sept 1, 2009 before the feature freeze takes place, so time's precious. Also, as Angie Byron noted, there are some accessibility issues that have been identified but not resolved for years. So, now that WCAG 2.0 is out and there seems to be a renewed interest in accessibility I was quite happy to see the interest in participants at the conference.

Between the two Bird of a Feather (geeky breakout group) workshops that were organized on accessibility issues we had nearly 40 people participate. Accessibility was discussed in other contexts too as it was something that many people are concerned with, especially when reconsidering core themes and usability. The discussions had a representative from DAISY, as well as several other accessibility experts. Individuals participated in the sessions because they believed in the issue, understood the requirements for it and also because they ultimately saw it as being profitable to the organizations and businesses that they represented.

William Lawrence gave a briefing about ACAG 2.0, the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines. Having a website that everyone can read is great, but having one that everyone can participate is even better. In a world where the Internet has become the town hall for the exchange of ideas, it is in fact essential for a functioning democracy. William had created a slideshow presentation on accessibility which we only barely touched on in the workshop. Last year he presented about Accessibility at the DrupalCon in Hungary.

One of the participants raised serious concerns about the maturity of the accessibility framework within the jQuery library. Preferring Dojo, the participant raised some good points about tools that are quickly becoming an integral part of Drupal. Fortunately there's been some good follow up on this topic in Drupal Groups. There's also good activity in the jQuery community to enhance accessibility issues there.

Accessibility issues are often a challenge as those people with ability to enhance the code are often not the group that is able to effectively test it. Fortunately, there was representation from a number of people with connections with people who can actually test how these technologies work. I did find it interesting to find out that those people who are blind from birth use screen readers differently than those who have become blind later in life.

Since access keys proved to interfere with the functionality of screen readers it is keyboard testing is limited to essentially just tabbing around between links and form elements on a page. Unfortunately, on Firefox on the Mac it seems that this is essentially disabled by default. Fortunately there are some good resources online on how to get browser tabs working properly on the Mac. Its difficult to consider using a website without using a mouse, but there are lots of times where it would be beneficial for all of us.

For me personally, the most exciting bit about the sessions though was meeting in person many of the people who are part of the Drupal group on accessibility. Getting more people active in this community was also wonderful to see. There have been a number of posts and follow-ups generated since the BoF. Was great to also know that people are editing the WCAG 2.0 wiki page that I uploaded, and to know when the site is upgraded to Drupal 6 that we'll have versioning enabled (so we'll be able to see who edited what when).

I think that the most exciting thing for the Drupal community will be the Documentation Sprint on Accessibility that happened on Saturday. The documentation on Accessibility & Drupal promises to be a core resource for those who want to learn how to make their site available to all.

Quick Accessibility Patch Accepted Into Core for Drupal 7

mgifford — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:29:56 -0500

For a list of Accessibility issues for Drupal 7.

Wanted to make a brief announcement about a small patch that OpenConcept contributed to Drupal 7 to enhance accessibility. Drupal's accessibility is quite good, but there are always ways to improve for any software. In this case someone reported a problem with radio buttons where the <LABEL> tag was not being associated properly with the appropriate form elements.

I looked at this problem, and rolled a patch for it (which included checkboxes as well) and then attached it to the project. As was discussed at the March 2008 DrupalCon, unit testing is being implemented to review patches to core before they get accepted. After re-implementing the patch in a new format it passed and it has been since approved by webchick who is also "Marking back to 6.x for consideration".

We are going through and looking at ways to enhance the accessibility of a variety of other Drupal projects as time allows. Currently we are looking at the Add This Button and Audio modules which currently break our site's validation.