DrupalCon

Recent Videos From DrupalCon About Accessibility

Submitted by mgifford on

Here's a summary of accessibility presentations from DrupalCon San Francisco & Chicago. I've put them in an order that I hope will allow people who know nothing about web accessibility to progress through a rather complex subject.  All DrupalCon videos are stored on Archive.org which now also has an option for using HTML5 video.

This is my first time using this great new HTML5 tag to embed a video. It's also a great space to higlight that there are as yet no captions available for these videos & I've yet to figure out how to make the controls accessible to keyboard only users & screen readers.  I'll certainly look at what options I can come up with using tools like Universal Subtitles & YouTube's Auto-Captioning. I've added Universal Subtitles so we can start adding captions to these videos. I also ran these all through the Videos for Everyone generator so that it would be available in Flash & HTML5.

 

DrupalCon Chicago and Accessibility

Submitted by mgifford on

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.

Fields in Core

Submitted by ethan on

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.

DrupalCon Boston 2008 - Here We Come!

Submitted by mgifford on

I'm excited to be heading down to the DrupalCon in Boston in March. It will be a great opportunity to meet with people I've only had the pleasure of meeting virtually over the past few years. There are some interesting Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions on non-profits, labour groups and government. I wanted to list some of the workshops that I'm particularly keen on:

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