Recently as we've been working on enhancements to Drupal 8, we run into several situations where we are looking at the jQuery library.  Drupal's been including the free software jQuery for the last two releases and are using it more and more as it evolves. We were hoping we'd be able to simply leverage a solid accessible jQuery UI element rather than have to continue to enhance our own javascript widgets.  

jQuery UI 1.8 has an autocomplete widget in it so why don't we just use this rather than re-invent the wheel for Drupal 8.  Unfortunately based on some quick testing by Everett Zufelt the autocomplete widget wasn't as accessible as what we have implemented in Drupal 7. At the writing of this post there are nearly 200,000 websites that report running Drupal 7 and are benefiting from the enhancements we've made. Investing in Drupal core is already removing barriers for millions of people on live websites. jQuery improvements will have an even bigger impact. 

Now ideally we'd have lots of resources put into central libraries like jQuery because when these core projects get enhanced, everyone who uses them benefits.  It just makes so much sense to invest limited accessibility funding into the projects which will have the biggest bang.  Just take a look at some of these jQuery powered sites and projects. Just having Drupal and WordPress using them means that by default it's being used by a large percentage of the web.  

Now there have been attempts in the past to improve the accessibility of jQuery & related widgets.  The Paciello Group (TPG) developed this library of accessible jQuery widgets through funding by AOL and AEGIS.  There is a similar initiative that's being spearheaded by the Government of Canada to better integrate accessible jQuery widgets for their Web Experience Toolkit. jQuery is the recommended javascript library for the implementation of the federal government's Common Look & Feel.  All Government of Canada sites are required to be WCAG 2.0 AA compliant by the summer of 2013, so improving jQuery's accessibility is critical for government. These are both good initiatives, but I haven't seen evidence of the work moving upstream and being adopted by the jQuery community. 

I ran across Holmes by Red Root thanks to Sean Yo and decided to check out how well it would work within a Drupal environment. Turns out that this clever markup detective will dig through & quickly highlight improper HTML markup with quite a lot of accuracy. There's so much power in CSS 3 it's exciting to see how it can be used to enhance accessibility. You can see the full testing suite in action, but I've also deliberately added some errors within this page.

One of the challenges with accessibility is that even when you have a great theme & have evaluated the modules and plugins your site uses, you still have to grapple with user generated content. Holmes, the CSS Markup Detective, is a very simple tool which provides a great way to double check that your content is written effectively. It's also trivial to add this into your existing Drupal theme and have it only loaded when an editor is viewing the site. Use of automated testing tools like WAVE & FAE need to be included in any accessible site and the holmes.css file is a great addition to this suite of validators. None of them will ensure that your site is without barriers, but it will at least alert you to the easy stuff that is often overlooked.

The code is now GPL and all you need to do is download the CSS file. In our case we're using the Genesis theme & so have placed it in our sub-theme's css directory. Then it's simply a matter of editing your template.php and adding this to your YOUR_THEME_preprocess_html() function:

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.

We've used CVS, SVN over the years and are now using Git. If you've not a programmer you probably wouldn't be familiar with tools like Concurrent Versions System or Subversion which allow for precise sharing & collaboration between thousands of people but with over 150,000 lines of code in Drupal Core, you really need to have a way to manage these details to ensure that you've got the highest quality control possible.  Git is the latest in social coding and because if it's distributed framework it should allow many more people to evaluate, experiment & collaborate with the Drupal community.  

Git & Drupal

Knowing that Drupal was adopting Git, we made the move to adopt it, replacing many of our other repositories.  There is quite a learning curve to get it set up and integrated with our processes, but it's been very impressive thus far.  Our ability to quickly integrate around a standard tool set that allows us to both track & centralize changes for our projects is already beginning to pay off.  Configuration files, default error messages, custom modules, client themes, not to mention Drupal core and community contributed themes/modules.