Note: The video/audio of this presentation is now available thanks to Patricia Shaver from the University of Guelph.

I took a great opportunity to go to Guelph to both participate in and present to the 2011 Accessibility Conference. I was able to meet with a number of great accessibility professionals from Southern Ontario who were gathered for this event at the University of Guelph.  I missed the A11yCamp which Sean Yo organized and also to Derek Featherstone's HTML5/CSS3 training, but sent two of my team to it.

In thinking about what to present to this audience I had rethink a few things.  In presenting to Drupal audiences I had to go into depth about accessibility and work to educate the audience about the various ways that their sites are perceived & operated.  Many of the people in the audience had more experience in this area than I did so this wouldn't have been much of a benefit.  There were a surprising number of Drupal people in attendance as many universities in Ontario are now using it as their default CMS.  That being said, I didn't feel that there would be enough to justify a talk focusing on this one system.  

I decided to focus the presentation what can be learned from Drupal that can be applied to any system.  There are best practices in accessibility that have been defined in Drupal and that I do hope are adopted by other systems.  I figured it would be worth pulling out some of the highlights from Drupal 7's enhancements that I think still stand as best practices and that are generic enough that they could be emulated by others.  I wanted to use this session to talk about ways the ways that with greater collaboration we could take and improve these best practices for all systems.

I was hoping that the video would be available online right now, but for now I'll summarize my presentation notes & provide a link to the slides.

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I don't know where the time's gone, but next week at this time I'm going to be at DrupalCon with thousands of other users & developers.  I've really enjoyed Boston, DC & San Francisco, and expect that Chicago will be just as exciting.  It's interesting to reflect that it was in 2008 at the Boston Keynote that Dries set the course for Drupal 7 challenged the community to embrace RDFa.  This was long before we became involved in making Drupal 7 more accessible, but making sites more machine readable will do a lot to making them more accessible to people too.  

William Lawrence gave the first Accessibility talk at a DrupalCon back in Szeged in 2008. I didn't get to see Accessibility: Best Practices In Drupal Theming, but was happy to meet with William at other DrupalCons.  In 2009, we helped to organize two Birds of a Feather sessions on Accessibility.   It was a great start, but unfortunately there were no main sessions looking at this issue.  In SF, there was a great session by 

Katherine but and also some frank strategic discussions about how to enhance on Drupal 7.  We were fortunate that John Foliot was able to come in and that we were able to bring in Cliff Tyllick on Skype.  

San Francisco also had two accessibility talks which were wonderful.  Everett Zufelt presented first at the Drupal Core Developers Summit. He also became Drupal's first Accessibility Maintainer. It was a strong presentation to the key decision makers in the Drupal community and having him give that talk was an important indication of how important this issue is.  Katherine Lynch gave the talk at the main conference Accessibility in Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 - Write Accessible Modules and Themes and did an impressive job explaining the importance of accessibility considerations.

I was invited by Dennis Lembree and Ross Johnson to contribute some audio for their 84th podcast celebrating the Web Axe 5-year anniversary. They have had a huge impact on the community over that time and really appreciate the work they put into raising awareness about accessibility. Please subscribe to the Web Axe podcast if this content is interesting to you.

The following is the text prepared for the podcast. I want to thank Cliff Tyllick for his help on preparing this:

My name is Mike Gifford and I am the president of OpenConcept Consulting, an Ottawa-based Drupal shop working closely with both government and non-governmental organizations. Drupal is a content management system — a tool for building websites so you can manage them with not only great power but also great finesse. As an open source project, Drupal is built, maintained, and improved by the people who use it every day.

Recognia provides technical analysis products (interpreted chart recognition) to large brokerage firms worldwide. They help the brokerage firms attract, retain and engage traders by providing actionable research tools. 

Recognia came to OpenConcept because they were trying to enhance their web presence with a new website that is more engaging to users, clearly defines the company mandate and product offerings and enables their internal team to take control of content entry.