How Drupal Helps with the GoC's New Standards on Web Accessibility & Usability
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.
However, simply having a open source license doesn't mean that people or departments will devote any time or effort to doing so. Fortunately an innovative team at Statistics Canada is pushing forward with an extremely promising initiative that promises to meet the needs of many departments struggling to meet WCAG 2.0 AA requirements. As with any community driven initiative you need at least one core member with a strong vision to push ideas and keep a project moving.
The theme developed by StatsCan is using the Government of Canada's new Standard on Web Usability. This theme was only officially released earlier this month, so it is great that there is a solid implementation already available with a free software license. The theme is also an extension of the Drupal theme Genesis, which has done more than any other Drupal 7 theme to meet accessibility requirements. This allows for the new WET theme to be more closely tied to the Drupal way, which will reduce costs & increase security.
Now StatsCan didn't develop this in isolation and worked with the RCMP, OpenPlus, LiquidCMS & OpenConcept to produce a very good Beta implementation. It's going to need greater contributions from other government departments who are already using Drupal or who are seriously considering deploying it. This shouldn't simply be within the federal government, and hopefully the Government of Ontario is able to start contributing more as they start launching more sites with this platform (a big site is about to be launched soon I understand). It takes more collaboration to make this as robust as I'd like to see it.
Long Live the Web Experience Toolkit
In December 2008, OpenConcept set up a Drupal site to demonstrate that we could meet the requirements of the Treasury Board Secretariat's Common Look & Feel (CLF) 2.0. We went further than this by releasing the code first to people within the Government of Canada & second we made it available through Intellectual Resources Canada (IRCan)'s repository. We provided a demonstration site to dispell Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt about open source & government, but also to engage with the government community to extend & improve this theme.
After two and a half years of voluntary effort, we've decided to lay this site down along with our involvement in maintaining the Zen based theme upon which it was built. It certainly been a learning experience and an opportunity for us to experiment, but never really realized the collaborative potential that we hoped it would.
One of the first challenges was that the CLF has been largely used as a branding document, it seems that there were some who feared that there would be confusion that this was indeed a Government of Canada website, so we swapped out the maple leaf with an oak leaf & made a few other similar changes with other elements of the brand. CLF 2.0 is strkingly better looking than CLF 1.0, but it's really amazing how little else on the web looks like it.
The AODA Customer Service Standard & Ontario's Public Sector Websites
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.
Government Accessibility Initiatives
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.
Government
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.
CLF 2.0 Branding, Training and Implementation
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.
Reflections on CLF and Accessibility
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.
Common Look and Feel Standards in a Drupal Theme
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.
