CLF 2.0

Ontario implemented the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) in 2005 and in January 2010 it will begin to enhance the level of services that people in this province can expect from their governments. 

Organizations Needing to Comply

The public sector organizations that now must meet the Customer Service Standard include Ontario government ministries, municipalities, school boards, community colleges, universities, public hospitals, public transportation organizations as well as some other agencies. All other organizations with over a year will have another two years before they need to conform to this standard.

The web has become a huge part of how people communicate and this act will significantly affect how organizations think about their online presence in the months to come. It is anticipated that websites by the organizations above will be required to reach compliance levels A of WCAG 2.0 (W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0). This will be a significant accomplishment as millions of web pages will need to be changed and evaluated. 

In an effort to create more accessible, more CLF compliant theme, not to mention in keeping with our gradual drift towards Zen, I've spent the past few days creating a Zen sub-theme called "Common Look And Feel". This theme is now online and visible here, at our dedicated CLF discussion group.

I spent two days earlier this week in presentations to largely government employees about accessibility issues.  It was organized by GOL Communications and we were invited largely to do with our work on the working to establish a collaborative CLF themes. 

There were more presentations about WCAG 2.0 than I'd ever heard prior to this event, and it was interesting to have it broken down int for principals that were pretty understandable.  We must all strive to make websites perceivable, operable, understandable & robust.  Surely focusing on those priorities as content developers would make our sites more useful for everyone. As CMS developers there is work that we need to do to better educate our users about how to manage this. 

Fortunately, there is a community of accessibility advocates within Drupal who are looking at enhancing Drupal's accessibility.  Who are looking to continually enhance modules, themes & understanding of accessibility issues.  Certainly the 508 requirements that many american organizations must comply with has helped pushed along the communities efforts.  The government of Ontario is pushing towards enforcing accessibility issues starting in 2011. There was a good presentation from the last DrupalCon on accessibility issues that i've embedded in our CLF Forum.

OpenConcept has been working with Government and contributing to the development of Common Look and Feel (CLF) themes for Drupal since 2006. In 2008 we worked with Canada School of Public Service, Environment Canada, Public Works, and Government Services Canada, and Industry Canada. Currently, we have an ongoing relationship with Public Works to build them a prototype for their website as well as their online procurement system. All of these clients required a CLF 2.0 theme for their website.

We have made our theme available as a demonstration site and is also available by request. We are collecting other Drupal themes that have been developed for other government agencies and work to evaluate those both for CLF compliance as well as it's flexibility within Drupal. 

Migrating to Drupal

We have experience in migrating websites from both static html and from custom built content management systems. By implementing a Drupal solution we can make it easier for you to setup and maintain CMS compliance on all pages of your website. xHTML Strict validation can be implemented not only for the template, but also for the content as it is added to your site.

Last week Steve Lecomte and I met with Marquis Coté & Tamey McIntosh with digitalOttawa to talk about CLF 2.0 implementation/training and the launch of their new site commonlookandfeel.ca. It was good to hear about their vision for the site and where they hope to take the community.  The site just launched this morning, and it is clear that they will be starting to add a lot of content to the site to help support a move towards compliance. We're looking forward to seeing where this initiative goes and finding ways to collaborate with others in the community. 

Steve was able to make it to the Common Look & Feel presentation hosted at GTEC at the beginning of November and brought back a general need for a validation methodology to help check the 23 million GoC web pages referenced by Google.  This would be quite a challenge for any organization, but when the standards combine both branding and accessibility it makes it that much more of a challenge.

I spent much of today talking about the Government of Canada's Common Look & Feel. For most people this is just the branding initiative that sets all federal websites to look more or less alike. There are lots of good reasons to do this, although mostly it is a matter of trying to ensure that the information is accessible.

Unfortunately, accessibility is something that takes a back seat to the branding that most people are concerned with. Search engines are the worlds biggest population of visually impaired site visitors, and yet very rarely is accessibility seen as a top priority.

For those in the theming world, Common Look and Feel for the Internet 2.0 (aka CLF) is the source of many hours of CSS tinkering and artistic compromise but necessary if you want to make a Government of Canada compliant website

The context of CLF is noble:

Canadians have the right to obtain information and services from Government of Canada Web sites regardless of the technologies they use. The key to effective implementation of universal accessibility lies in designing sites to serve the widest possible audience and the broadest possible range of hardware and software platforms, from adaptive technologies to emerging technologies.