Planet

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.

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.

Earlier this year I found out about Ada Lovelace Day (March 24th), and decided that I would pledge along with 1600+ others to blog about women who have contributed to science and technology. Fortunately, I am a Drupal developer, so there are lots of great examples of women taking leadership roles. I'm called to blog about the contributions of Angie Byron, known in the community as webchick.

Yesterday was the third Drupal 7 accessibility taskforce meeting, and the final meeting before code freeze. With September 1 just around the corner the Drupal accessibility community would like to reach out the the broader community for some additional help during this busy time to get as many accessibility improvements into Drupal 7 core as possible.

It was the first sunny day we've had in a week, a perfect day to spend on a patio after work drinking a pint. However 35 people made their way to The Code Factory to attend the Drupal in Government Showcase. This was the largest Drupal event ever held in Ottawa and it clearly demonstrated that there is interest in this Content Management System.

Having organized the event we wanted to highlight the CLF 2.0 theme that are providing to the community as well as the extensive work that we have done on introducing accessibility enhancements to Drupal.

NOTE: We have since followed up with another Drupal in Government event which was recorded future use.

We had three interesting case studies presented. Mark Stephenson of RealDecoy, presented on their work with the Canadian Human Rights Museum. Steve Etlinger of Wirespeak presented two case studies of their experience developing Drupal sites for government clients. 

Introduction

I have been encouraged by the increased participation in the Drupal 7 accessibility issue queue in the past few weeks. There are still a number of outstanding issues that are fundamental to improving the accessibility of Drupal 7. Some of these issues can be dealt with after code freeze, others need to be dealt with before.

I believe that Drupal accessibility has to be adopted and fostered at the grassroots level.  Hopefully after code freeze some additional accessibility documentation can be added to Drupal.org and the documentation that is currently on the site can be reordered to make it more useful.  I believe that clear and thorough documentation will lower the barrier for entry into the Drupal accessibility arena, making it easier for community members to get involved who currently don't know where to start.

This morning I had the opportunity to evaluate the accessibility of the d7ux administration theme (Information Architecture) "Seven". My evaluation was not intended to be thorough, or to identify every web accessibility conformance problem, but to get a feel for what the theme will be like for screen-reader users, and what broad accessibility issues need to be addressed.

I must say that from the perspective of a Drupal administrator and screen-reader user that I believe that the theme will be seen as a useful and welcome addition to Drupal 7 by many users. Although there are clearly many accessibility issues to tidy up before Seven is truly accessible, I was surprised at how easy it was to get accustomed to using the iframe "Overlay" panel which appears at the bottom of the page, (if navigated in DOM order).

Today was an exciting day, the first Drupal 7 Accessibility Taskforce Meeting. Don't worry if you weren't able to join us, there are two more meetings scheduled in August.

I am overwhelmingly encouraged by the number of people who were able to take time from their busy schedules to help with brainstorming about some of the important steps involved in ensuring that Drupal 7 is the world's most accessible content management system (CMS). We had at least nine participants and were able to come to consensus on many fundamental issues regarding the accessibility of Drupal 7.

Last week Dr. Sameer Verma invited me to give a presentation on using Drupal's CCK & Views modules at an all day open workshop he was giving to promote FOSS use in preparation for Software Freedom Day 2009 here in Jamaica. It is very nice to see Drupal being recognised as a substantial member of the FOSS comunity.

I want to take a moment to introduce myself and to share my thoughts on Drupal 7 accessibility.

Introduction

I have been loosely involved in web development for 12 years. Over the course of this time I lost my sight due to a degenerative eye disease. When I started using a screen-reader I realized that navigating the web can be very difficult for persons with disabilities, and was somewhat disturbed with all of the coding mistakes that I had made over the years that may have contributed to this problem.