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.
Quick Accessibility Evaluation of GoC Sites
Like many government agencies, the Government of Canada has a mandate to address accessibility issues. The Common Look & Feel presently is based on the 1999 accessibility standard WCAG 1.0 and will shortly require WCAG 2.0 compliance. This falls within the Management Accountability Framework, which is an incentive based system for management. Internal audits are presently being used to evaluate accessibility improvements over time.
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 Challenge of Collaborative Editing in Government
I've actively encouraged NGOs to use Google Docs for real-time collaborative editing. They have a really great suite of tools which really should make emailing Word Documents between editors a thing of the past. There have been a limited number of tools that allowed for this type of process, however we've been experimenting with a great open source tool called Etherpad which will make this process much more common, especially within government agencies.
We've been using this interface at iEtherpad now and have been quite impressed by it's ease of use. It's simpler than Google Docs, but has a few features that make it easier to use & collaborate with others. Etherpad allows you to create simple public scratch pads on the fly or set up private workspaces for your team (and all for free).
Because this is open source, we've investigated implementing this within our server environment and even within Drupal. The Drupal module for Etherpad integration is presently only available on GitHub. We've forked this to start working on a Drupal 7 version of this Etherpad module.
All of this requires some upgrades to the server to run the core Etherpad code. Fortunately there is good support for Etherpad in Debian. We have only begun working with this code, but see that there is so much potential for the communities we work with.
Accessibility Issues Are Inevitable, So Let's Get On With It!
Back in November of 2010 Federal Court Justice Michael Kelen gave the Treasury Board of the Government of Canada (GoC) 15 months to make all of it's websites accessible to the blind. This is still a landmark case even though the government decided to appeal the case on Jan 10th. I'm not sure how much longer the appeal will extend the case, but the writing is on the wall, the GoC is going to need to begin the long and difficult process of ensuring that it's millions of public web pages are accessible to all Canadians.
It is unclear at this point what will come from the appeal. I would hope that the judgement is revised to:
- a strengthened mandate for collaboration between departments on making accessibility enhancements;
- a properly resourced, centralized agency for departments to help make their sites more accessible;
- a grandfather clause to exclude web pages that were last modified before January 1st 2009 (unless requested by public);
- an improved & consistent mechanism to report accessibility/usability problems to be added to the CLF framework;
- expansion to include everyone with disability issues and not just blind Canadians.
Running a 15 Month Marathon of Government Accessibility
Donna Jodhan has won a landmark case to fix accessibility problems for the blind within Government of Canada websites. This judgement has some problems with it, not the least of which is how to make 247 million plus web pages accessible. The judgment was delivered out on November 29th, 2010 and so the government is now tasked to upgrade the accessibility of these pages in March of 2012. That is 19 business days away from today, which would mean 13000000 pages per day would have to be evaluated for use with a screen-reader and enhanced in order to fulfill the judge's ruling.
Clearly even if there was a budget to implement this, there aren't the people with the skills & the infrastructure in place to properly evaluate this volume of work within the federal government.
As daunting as this task looks, there are a great many ways to make this challenge more manageable.
Drupal in Government Ottawa Showcase - A Great Success
The Drupal Showcase that we organized on June 15th was a great success. This event was organized & sponsored by OpenConcept and we were able to bring together over 75 people to learn about how and why public servants are using Drupal effectively to communicate.
We had representatives from 15 government departments including: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA), Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC), Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB), Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (FAIT), Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), Department of Justice (DoJ), Library and Archives Canada (LAC), Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), Public Works & Government Services Canada (PWGSC), Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat(TBS), and Department of National Defence and the Canadian Forces (DND) as well as the City of Ottawa.
The showcase began with an overview of why Drupal by Lee Hunter who works as a government contractor and is also a member of the Drupal Documentation Team. This was followed by a presentation by Devin Crawley & Michael Keara about implementing a user-centred approach in Drupal and outlining the approach used by the Ottawa Public Library (OPL). It was great having the OPL present as the event was also held in the Library & their support helped to bring more people into the event. Patrick Lajeunesse gave a great talk about using Drupal to prototype a CLF compliant Intranet and provided great examples from Agriculture Canada. The final presentation from government was by the Department of National Defence whose presentation outlining their use of Drupal for their Social Networking Intranet was quite inspiring. Jayson Peltzer provided some examples of how they are using Drupal & MediaWiki for all of their social networking needs. The last presentation was by CIPPIC's David Fewer & Kent Mewhort who addressed their findings on Government of Canada contributions to GPL Projects. I decided not to present my report on the Drupal 7 Accessibility Initiative and it's implications for the CLF & AODA, but will find time to do that in another time.
The event was recorded thanks to volunteers at FOSSLC. FOSSLC is a non-profit corporation dedicated to education, community, and business development involving open source technologies. They have been very active in promoting free software around the world and will be putting on an Open Source Technology showcase in August. Emma Jane Hogbin will be presenting a workshop there on Basic Design for Drupal.
I took some pictures of the event and added them to a Flickr Set. If there are other photos you've taken, please tag them with drupalgov.
Organizing for Drupal in Government in Ottawa
For the last month we've been actively organizing to set up a showcase of Drupal sites in Government here in Ottawa. There are a lot of departments that are using this great CMS and this is the first event of it's kind working to get the public sector together and talk about the work they've done.
We've already got more than 50 people signed up for the event on Tuesday, June 15th. We are quite happy with our list of speakers and know this will be a great opportunity for people to hear about the variety of ways this tool is being used in the public sector.
Lee Hunter will start by providing an overview of Drupal. This will be quite useful for the majority of people in communications who may not be all that familiar with what this content management system is or how it affects them.
The event is going to be at the Ottawa Public Library, and we are happy to have both Devin Crawley & Chris Simmons present on their implementation for their public website. Their focus will be on implementing a user-centred approach.
Changing government standards and ‘Common Look and Feel’
This is a reprint of the post I wrote for GovFresh. It's mostly a re-write of the earlier blog post I wrote specifically for the Canadian government.
Most western governments have in the last decade developed an accessibility strategy for their websites, often based on WCAG 1.0. At the end of 2008, the WC3 announced the final version of WCAG 2.0 and the public sector is now struggling to keep up. In Canada there was a recent announcement about a revised Common Look and Feel (CLF). In the USA the Section 508 is in its first of six revisions, part of which will be to adapt to the new approach to standards. I’m not sure that most citizens will notice the changes to government websites, however for both people with disabilities and the tax payers, it will be a very big deal.
The Government of Canada Stops Supporting IE6
I'm happy to hear of the Government of Canada's recent announcement that they will no longer be supporting Interent Explorer 6. This is not an easy decision as many government departments chose to develop applications for a single proprietary browser rather than based on international standards. It will be expensive to retrofit many outdated systems, but it is important to fix what is widely understood to be tragically short term thinking.
Although IE6 held considerable market share historically, many security problems are causing governments around the world to officially drop support of this old browser. Both hackers & foreign government agents are able to hack the system to gain access to critical systems in governments and business.
Google's reduction of support for IE6, starting last month, is also a consideration. So many Web 2.0 tools are connected to Google these days and with the government looking to connect more with it's citizens, this is going to be a problem.
