WAVE

Quick Accessibility Evaluation of GoC Sites

Submitted by mgifford on

Two kids sifting gravelLike 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. 

As I noted in my last blog Accessibility Tips for Management even with this regulation, how is management supposed to know when their site is accessible or not.  Despite the Donna Jodhan ruling of 2010, I do not think that there is a clear sense from within management of how accessible their present sites are.
 
I decided to go through some government departments to look for accessibility problems.  Now there are over 100 Government of Canada departments and I didn't have the time to approach this in a very scientific way, but I was able to easily see that there is a great deal of work that still needs to be done on accessibility in the federal government.  As per my blog post I used the WAVE Toolbar to run through a quick analysis of knowable problems.  

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Accessibility Tips for Management

Submitted by mgifford on

FAE evaluation of website

Most accessibility articles are written for either developers or designers who need guidance on how to implement accessibility fixes.  There's a lot more to write on this subject, but I was looking for articles written for the communications professionals who are overseeing web project. In most large organizations the people directing the sites development are not the same people as those who are coding it.  

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.

 

Accessibility Critique of the 2010 Open Source CMS Report!

Submitted by mgifford on

Earlier this year we agreed to sponsor the IdealWare's 2010 report comparing popular open source content management systems, and we're glad to have done so! It is so important to have a review of different systems if only to encourage discussion & debate about software use in the non-profit sector.

Why Drupal 7 is Great

Earlier this week I bosted on the NOSI discussion list about Drupal 7's accessibility enhancements. I know how much more accessible it was than Drupal 6. I have also done some work to compare it with other popular CMS systems.  We've developed a frank accessibility statement, that outlines not just what the software does, but how we will work for a more inclusive community. There is an active accessibility community both online & in conference BoF (birds of a feather) sessions. 

We've addressed a great many accessibility challenges and done so in a way that is public so that other communities can draw on our experience. There are also people who are contributing leading edge approaches to managing accessibility. An organization looking to build an accessible site now should really be looking at adopting as much HTML5 as possible. Drupal 7 core is presently built on xHTML, but there are more accessible themes which allow more use of the still draft HTML5 & WAI-ARIA.

WCAG 2.0 AAA - A Journey Not a Destination

Submitted by mgifford on

My finger pointing at the WCAG 2.0 AAA logo I've taken the notes about the process we are going through for our own site & attached it to this Drupal Accessibility Group Wiki Page. Please feel free to edit it.

We have gotten a number of RFP's in the past that have stated WCAG 2.0 AAA compliance as one of the requirements that they would like to have in their response.  It is great when folks are aware enough about accessibility issues that they can state of of their goals is to achieve the highest level of accessibility for their site. Really, who wouldn't want to have their website be universally accessible to their users?

However, it isn't an achievable goal for the majority of websites.

Nobody should be claiming WCAG 2.0 AAA

For a website site with any complexity at all to it:

  • It takes a huge accessibility budget to maintain. It is very time intensive to run every page of the site through the quick reference provided by the WAI. Even running through it through WebAIM's simplified checklist is a lengthy process. 
  • Some of the WCAG 2.0 AAA requirements can conflict with each other or other WAI guidelines. You have to know your users, and learn where to make compromises.
  • There probably aren't any examples out there of sites that are 100% compliant.  Individual pages might comply, but will still need to be reviewed on a regular basis.
  • The WAI is wisely focuses on broad objectives not on specific technology and the technology is perpetually changing. A user's browser or screen reader upgrade can easily break accessibility.

Webinar on Planning an Accessible Website

Submitted by mgifford on

Everett Zufelt & I have agreed to present a webinar entitled Introduction to Accessibility and Planning for an Accessible Website. We'll be posting links to the archive when it's up, but wanted to ensure that the presentations were available online (along with a PDF version) before it went live in case people wanted to follow along this way.

This presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license so please feel free to enhance/distribute it.

For those that missed it there is now a video archive of the presentation available.

State of Drupal 7 Accessibility and Introduction

Submitted by Everett Zufelt on

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.

Quick Accessibility Tweaks in Drupal

Submitted by mgifford on

WAVE ReportI was looking at the WAVE report for our site earlier today and saw a number of places where we could improve accessibility rather easily.

WAVE is one of the easiest to use accessibility tests that I've used. Not only does it present it to you with a visual representation of your site, but it also provides links about what the problems are right inline. The first thing I fixed was that we had styled some text with a div & classes, but it would have given more meaning to users if we had just applied that CSS class to an EM tag so that it carried the emphasis properly without the styles.

The next thing I noticed was complaints about empty H1 & H2 tags produced by our site. I could eliminate blank titles easily by just checking to see if the title was empty before printing out the HTML in the page.tpl.php file:

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