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.
The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7
OpenConcept has been donating books to the Ottawa Public Library for a couple years now, and so last fall I ordered a bunch of Drupal 7 books anticipating that we'd review them within our team & then order new ones to the library had a fresh copy. I ordered my copy of the Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 (DGD7) back in 2010 along with several others. Well, Drupal 7 took a while to get finalized and so many of the books which were started then didn't actually get finished until after Drupal core had been finalized in January.
It was just after Dries keynote at the Chicago DrupalCon that Benjamin Melançon approached me at the last moment to try to get an accessibility appendix added to the the book. With all of the accessibility enhancements that had gone into Drupal 7 & the emphasis that Dries gave it for the Drupal 8 process, it was clear that this needed to be covered in the book. It's been a long process working on Drupal core and I've had the pleasure to work with Bojhan Somers, Jacine Luisi, Károly Négyesi, Nathaniel Catchpole and Roy Scholten. I've met with other contributors at DrupalCons and DrupalCamps I have attended -- this is definitely a book which is very representative of this broad community. {C}
OpenConcept's New Look
In case you haven't noticed, the OpenConcept website has had an overhaul as of late. In migrating to Drupal 7, we not only were looking to migrate from our outdated Drupal 5 website but were excited for the opportunity to design an entirely new theme. OpenConcept partnered with Rachela Brisindi, from RGB Creative (http://www.rgb-creative.com/) in order to update our logo and website design. Although Rachela was more experienced in print design, she had a strong creative vision and was interested in learning more about designing for the web.
Once the OC team had approved Rachela's logo, wireframe and full design mockup, it was time to turn the design into a fully functional, Drupal 7 theme. We were happy to take her initial creative work & run with it, producing what is now our new corporate website.
Web Accessibility Evaluation 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 fundimetaly different than a custom built website, because the framework that is actively being reviewed for accessibility improvements.
Using the jQuery Tweet! Scripts with Drupal
I needed to make some modifications to our blog page and include some of the micro-blogging we've been doing. I ultimately just wanted to add a block to selective pages to allow us to feature what we are saying on Twitter and although there are a few Drupal modules, they seemed like overkill for what I needed. The most widely used Twitter module doesn't have a Drupal 7 release yet. There was a Twitter Block module with a D7 release, but I ran into a bug which stopped it from for me (although this is being fixed by the maintainer). I ran into Twitter Pull, Daily Tweet & Tweet only when writing this article, but both have Drupal 7 versions.
Although there were various tutorials on how to embed Twitter into your Drupal site, none of them were quite what I was looking for. I figured I'd search for jQuery & Twitter to see if I could find a widget I'd like and came across Tweet! which seemed to do what I was looking for. I liked the flexibility of this script and figured that this might be the easiest way to integrate it into our blog. Bing able to pull from lists or pre-set lists of Twitter users seemed pretty powerful. I also really liked that the code was available through GitHub.
I ran into some difficulties implementing this and decided to check out the GitHub issue queue to see how well it worked. I've participated a lot in SourceForge & Drupal issue queues in the past but was happy with the clean presentation in GitHub. I was also happy to get fast response from the maintainer who really helped me get this up quickly.
Drupal 7
There is just so much to say about Drupal 7 and advantages to upgrading. There is so much excitement around this new platform and I'm very happy that we've been able to play a small part in getting this application to where it is now. I've already talked at length about accessibility issues with this release, but it's time to focus a bit more on some of the other great aspects.
Usability
There's been so much work that has gone into usability. There are two new themes which have been added, Bartik and Seven. Bartik provides a fresh new public look for default sites as the old Garland theme moves toward retirement. Seven is the default administration theme providing a strong, simple framework for editing content. For the first time there was a process which defined the minimum elements required for a new theme to get into core, this really improved the quality of all of the themes.
There is a much more consistent design pattern that has been implemented that makes it easier for people to get help, to predict how new elements will work and focus on the critical items on the page. Drupal is such a powerful, flexible tool that it can be easy to overwhelm people with options. Having well thought out design patterns helps user experience. The usability team ran early beta's through usability tests early enough that changes were able to be brought into core.
There are other great tools like customizable shortcuts, contextual links and toolbars that are great. It's nice to have that level of basic, quick navigation that you can fall back on, where as previously we generally installed the Admin Menu module as soon as we could to speed up our work. The shortcuts in particular make it way easier to get to Performance page to clear the cache. Speaking of clearing the cache and usability, it's great that there's a big button on the top of the page that makes it easy to clear cached pages, CSS and Javascript. I also like that the Status report is given a higher profile.
Together At Last: HTML5 & Drupal
OpenConcept Consulting takes a step into the future of the web with HTML5. Witness the power of lightning fast and super stable in-page video with the stunning effects of jQuery. Accessible, mobile friendly, sleek and flexible: HTML5 is where our heart is.
We are early adopters of many new technologies so that we can test/evaluate them before implementing them for our clients. We pushed forward with an early Drupal 7 install so that we could dedicate some time to working out the remaining kinks that are holding back implementation of this great new version. We've been using social media to extend our network with others & continue to explore how it can be used to improve our services. With so many new technologies you really do need to dive into them before you know how they can be used.
Although the standards for HTML5 are still in draft form, there really isn't any debate about the core aspects of this new standard. Yes, if you want to use some of the really cutting edge pieces of this new standard, you're going to have to pick and choose very carefully. There are great tools like the When Can I use site which gives a summary of what functions are supported by which browsers. We've clearly stated that we're not supporting IE6. Eliminating support for IE6 allows us to build sites based on W3C standards rather then specific browsers. IE support is still generally lagging behind other browsers, but both IE7 & IE8 support most of what we are likely going to want to implement.
There are great tools to see how well your browser supports HTML5. There are a bunch of HTML5 elements for instance that we aren't going to be implementing until there is better support for them (I use Firefox 3.6 and it only scores 155/400 points). However, we can already start to take advantage of the new elements that are part of this new standard.
DrupalCon Chicago and Accessibility
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.
Launching Early with Drupal 7
We've been very busy working on Drupal 7 enhancements for the last two years. It's gotten really hectic around our office in the last few months so we're not able to devote the time we wanted to launch a flashy new design. We've got a new design in the works to replace the one we set up back in early 2007 when Drupal 5 came out, but we've been prioritizing our efforts on getting to our clients sites rather than finishing up ours.
Accessibility Enhancements for Drupal 6 Themes - Admin Side
The last in the series of Drupal 6 accessibility enhancements that we're publishing will focus on improving the admin side. There is a good guide to developing theme overrides on Drupal.org. This post provides examples of modified functions that are improvements over what is in Drupal 6, mind you there are several elements fixed in Drupal 7 which can't easily be back-ported.
Now the distinction of admin side vs user facing is a bit outdated in most modern CMS's. In most cases, the same HTML tools that are required to administer a site may also be used to make a nice interactive site. Usually it's a matter of making sure that any forms are presented in an accessible manner.
