Accessibility

Just saw this accessibility evaluation of Recovery.gov by Jim Thatcher. Recovery.gov is the highest profile Drupal government site in North America and so it is an interesting view of how this government which is committed to accessibility & open government implements this great CMS.

Posted up a suggestion on the Theme & Design track for DCParis about including some web accessibility material.

I think a lot of what we're working on/discussing here could be gelled into a solid panel discussion or presentation directly applicable to Drupal themers and the T&D track looks really interesting already.

-Kate

Here at CSU Monterey Bay we have a mandate from our Chancellor's office that all web content be accessible by 2010. This date is fast approaching, but we are moving towards a model where we automatically approve content for accessibility before it goes out to the web.

I recently had someone ask me about Drupal's compliance with a few standards and thought this group would be a great place to start some discussion.

• Section 508 compliance
• WAI (W3C Web Accessibility Initiative) compliance

I haven't done any formal research on the topic, but my impression is that Drupal core is compliant with all of these standards. I believe that as we head off into contributed modules/themes they quickly deviate from these standards.

Lee has asked for some docs for the Best Practices section of the Theming Guide (http://drupal.org/node/341707).

I made a start a couple of weeks ago but it would be good to get some feedback on what we think should go into this.

I'm tending to think it should be pretty high level, but with enough depth and examples so a themer can pretty much get the basics right without having to go to an external resource, but with links to external resources with additional information.

I am searching for a WYSIWYG editor, which is build using the ATAG standards in mind.
Does any of you know an editor who complies to these standards?

Setting Up a Screen Reader Test Environment
http://www.iheni.com/screen-reader-testing/

How to Use NVDA and Firefox to Test Your Web Pages for Accessibility
http://www.marcozehe.de/articles/how-to-use-nvda-and-firefox-to-test-you...

WAI-ARIA role support - How the Browsers Stack Up
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=114

Thanks,
Mike

There's been some really great work done looking at usability within Drupal - http://www.d7ux.org/

However, I do think that it is important to start talking about accessibility with any new visions of how content is going to be created and sites are going to be administered.

Hello,

I want to add images to my site, and am concerned about the accessibility issues.
I have done a lot of reading on the subject, and to say the least I am a little confused as how to proceed.
Is there a recommended solution ie what modules I should use and how to implement them with accessibility in mind?

TYIA

I'd like to post a focus on Date/Calendar modules accessibility.
Following mgifford's comment on a Calendar issue regarding accessibility I'm posting here some issues for that modules that would need some love/reviews from users who cares about accessibility.

I'm talking about:
- Calendar: Accessible calendar navigation thoughts providing a "caption" for calendar table
- Date: More accessible date navigation with prev/next and month link-titles

Hi all,
Drupal is mentioned in an interesting blog post at Standards Schmandards,
Contributing WAI-ARIA landmark roles to open source CMS themes.

In discussing the question of inserting a tabindex to create an auto focus for certain pages (/user, /node/add, node/*/edit) so that the cursor is always sitting in the first field of the event in question, v suggested that this was more of a usability issue than an accessibility one. I recorded a friend with mobility challenges trying to create an account for those who want some understanding of how important this could be.

So I was reading Practical Accessibility Tips with WCAG 2.0

Always Use Explicit Labels is in 7 core now and has been backported ot 6.

The use the tabindex attribute is also quite scarce. Think it only shows up in the user.module as an attribute added to the form:

Right now we're indicating Required Fields using:

Well, there are labels for pages like the permission page - /admin/user/permissions

I was looking over this critique from Juice Studio about Drupal's Accessibility.

And labels are there, but it's all code, so really not sure how useful it is. We'd probably want each box to be populated by a label with the role instead of the number of the role & so that a screen reader could properly explain what a particular checkbox is about:

First, a bit of good news, we got another accessibility feature into core - http://drupal.org/node/356359

Still have a lot to do before this list is addressed though - http://drupal.org/node/364629

Next, over the weekend I ran a good friend of mine through a quick usability test of Drupal 7. He was a good enough sport to let me tape it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyIHtNHYroM

Hello all. I am a new face around here, with a background in accessibility compliance and testing. I thought I would pitch in to help make Drupal as accessible as possible.

I am starting by looking at the Accessibility Guidelines for Drupal 7: WCAG 2.0 & ATAG 1.0, but if anyone knows of an area with a more critical need for attention, please let me know.

Under the section "1.4.1 Use of Color (Level A)", there is an item with the following:

Color is not used as the sole method of conveying content or distinguishing visual elements. - Red * for mandatory fields

Me and quicksketch are discussing some accessibility enhancements to Imagefield over at http://drupal.org/node/193887 (ALT text optionally required unless the user checks off a "decorative" checkbox, longdesc support, limiting ALT text to 80 characters). It would be great to get some input from you guys.

Hi everybody,
As one of a BoF Accessibility participants on the last day of DrupalCon DC 2009, I decided to get involved and help out in what can be done to improve accessibility in Drupal. As a newbie, this is my very first post on this Accessibility Groups forum.

There are a couple of things (in order) that I'd like to share with you in what items can be implemented right away into Drupal. Right off the top of my head, of course.

From The American Foundation of the Blind (AFB):

• A Review of the Accessibility of Facebook
• Survey on Social Networking Sites

At the documentation sprint at DrupalCon D.C. , we began the Accessibility documentation pages. They are currently at: http://drupal.org/node/394094

There are a number of ways people can help with this documentation:

<

ul>

Getting Drupal to emit screen-reader friendly dates is a pain in the butt. It can, however, be done. Here's a detailed account of my efforts on that score, complete with tests in two screen readers (including MP3s for your listening pleasure), some analysis, and a detailed walk through of customizing the code for a DATE element.

I'm using the Password Policy module to enforce strong passwords. When a user changes their password, the module displays a password strength indicator via Javascript. I'd like to add the ARIA live region role to the span that contains the strength indication and error message.

Hacking the Javascript is pretty simple. I'd like to consider the options for doing this the "best" way.

I made two small patches to D7 to improve the accessibility of the search form:

http://drupal.org/node/356359
http://drupal.org/node/368759

It's another small change for accessibility. I think this will help, but would appreciate feedback on these changes. Certainly it improves things with my tests using:

http://wave.webaim.org/

Mike

WebAIM has just published the initial results of its January 2009 survey of people who use screen readers and other forms of assistive technology (AT). Find the WebAIM survey's initial results here.

I have barely looked at this information, but a few points do jump out at me:

Would like to get some folks contributing to this checklist for Drupal Core. Would be nice if D7 was WCAG 2.0 compliant out of the box.

Drupal Core Accessibility Guidelines

Because Drupal is a web content authoring tool it must also meet Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines.

Drupal Themeing Accessibility Guidelines

This is a great resource for Drupal Theming brought to you by the nice folks at WebAIM.

WCAG 2.0 Checklist

• Perceivable
• Operable
• Understandable
• Robust

Important: The following is NOT WCAG 2.0. It is, however, a simple checklist that presents the principles and techniques of WCAG 2.0 in a more user-friendly, understandable format. The language has been significantly changed and simplified from the official WCAG 2.0 specification to make it more easily tested and verified for web pages. While this checklist may be very handy in pursuing accessibility and WCAG conformance, please reference WCAG 2.0 documentation to verify actual conformance.

I would really like to understand this issue better - http://drupal.org/node/58941

As Webchick says "If 1/50th of the people complaining that this isn't fixed yet actually put some energy into reading the copious documentation cross-linked here and creating said patch, this probably would've made it into Drupal 4.7."

So, I'd like some other opinions about the difference between:

Getting a Drupal 6 Site up to FAE Standards

FAE

This is a short talk I gave the other day. I'm looking for feedabck. code is at:

http://staff.ed.uiuc.edu/jbarclay/accessible/accessible.zip

and

http://staff.ed.uiuc.edu/jbarclay/accessible/fck_accessibility_tweaks.zi...

UPDATE: I started at http://drupal.org/project/accessible - Johnbarclay

I use a simple little module I wrote called accessibile to help with accessibility. I'm attaching it and looking for feedback on the general approach as well as the details of it. Here is the gist of the module:

==================================================
This is a helper module to make creating accessible websites easier. It is intended to:

• add functionality to allow authors to class block headings as "offscreen"

I followed up on a bug report about accessibility issues and radio buttons. Created the patch and had it approved by the test bot and others that reviewed the code.

However I'm requesting support from the accessibility community to see if we can't bring it into Drupal 7 core.

Form labels for radio & checkbox(s) are not properly done with Drupal at the moment and don't follow WCAG 2.0 Guidelines.

In a recent WCAG 2.0 presentation I was attending it was stressed that websites should not be using the same text to link to different URL's. So, with a generic Drupal blog when the teaser node produces 10 or so "Read more", "Add new comment" or "Send to friend" links, each going to unique URLs for the corresponding post it becomes very difficult for screen readers to navigate.

In an accessibility blog post I wrote about quick accessibility enhancements, I described an easy way to make the Read more link more descriptive. I believe it's also got some both SEO & click through advantages too.

I Just submitted a patch for the Drupal eCommerce which included a localisation patch for Irish counties - so autocomplete forms work when a customer from the Island of Ireland is selecting their county (state).

This is by no means an official list. It's a list I compiled myself using the county codes from car registration plates as the basis.

If anyone knows of an official county code list for Ireland, please post a reply up here.

This issue cropped up recently (I am not sure if it has been discussed elsewhere or even resolved). If it has please let me know. With the advent of version 6 a couple of my vision impaired friends have told me they find it much more difficult to use blocks in version 6. This has resulted in some of them going back to using version 5.*. This issue concerns the keyboard accessibility of blocks. i believe there has been a move towards a "drag and drop" model with blocks when re-ordering page content.

Views Filters with Exposed Select Lists

Problem: Long lists in exposed filters require control key + multi-selects which are subject to keyboard errors.

Solution: Convert select lists to scrolled check box items for specific filters (not globally)

Some Possible Approaches:
irc:drupal-support 6/30/2008
[18:30] http://drupal.org/project/views_checkboxes
[18:31] I've tried this using phptemplate_form_alter in my template.php
[18:31] http://drupal.org/node/138374#comment-545078

Proteon develops and supports vital sites for big customers. We work with multiple open source platforms. We focus on Drupal and Plone. Development is executed by our teams in Russia, Argentina and South Africa. The people who talk with the customers are based in the Netherlands.

Hi everybody

I run an Internet page for blind and otherwise visually impaired users and have some thoughts on making a talk (audio) support/dialogue feature. The most basic implementation could be as simple as a text chat, only using sound instead, of course.

Hi!
I'm peach, or Jurriaan, from All Drupal Themes and I'm having some trouble finding good themes to port and release to the community. I've already ported several themes but it turns out there were some problems:
-Apparently people were more interested in 3-column themes
-Some of the themes were not deemed useful at all
-Most good looking themes I find are Creative Commons licensed, which makes sense from the designers point of view, but unfortunately they are not allowed on drupal.org/project/Themes. I was reassured when I signed up for a cvs account that I must not upload CC2.5 licensed themes, only GPL.

I've created this post to communicate with the Drupal community, for whom I make the themes, and hopefully some people have good ideas for themes to be ported to drupal! If anyone has a GPL theme in mind please post it in the comments sections.

If you know of a gorgeous CC licensed design, it's also eligible for a free drupal port but I will put it up with my free drupal themes department but it won't show up on drupal.org/project/Themes.

Looking forward to your input!
JR

Hi!
I'm peach, or Jurriaan, from All Drupal Themes and I'm having some trouble finding good themes to port and release to the community. I've already ported several themes but it turns out there were some problems:
-Apparently people were more interested in 3-column themes
-Some of the themes were not deemed useful at all
-Most good looking themes I find are Creative Commons licensed, which makes sense from the designers point of view, but unfortunately they are not allowed on drupal.org/project/Themes. I was reassured when I signed up for a cvs account that I must not upload CC2.5 licensed themes, only GPL.

I've created this post to communicate with the Drupal community, for whom I make the themes, and hopefully some people have good ideas for themes to be ported to drupal! If anyone has a GPL theme in mind please post it in the comments sections.

If you know of a gorgeous CC licensed design, it's also eligible for a free drupal port but I will put it up with my free drupal themes department but it won't show up on drupal.org/project/Themes.

Looking forward to your input!
JR

I've started writing a task focused on accessibility for the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. Then I remembered about this group. I'm no accessibility expert, so I thought I'd post a link to the draft of the task, in case anyone would like to provide feedback.

I've started writing a task focused on accessibility for the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. Then I remembered about this group. I'm no accessibility expert, so I thought I'd post a link to the draft of the task, in case anyone would like to provide feedback.

Hi All,

I have recently uploaded a new Drupal theme, called Flexible. One of the goals was to build accessibility features into the system. These include:
- "hidden" links for speech readers at the start of the page so users can "skip to content" or "skip to navigation" etc.
- built-in alternative style sheets for high contrast, large fonts etc
- ability to "linearise" the content
- support for standard accessibility keys
- the ability for users to store the above preferences so they are loaded automatically next time

Hi All,

I have recently uploaded a new Drupal theme, called Flexible. One of the goals was to build accessibility features into the system. These include:
- "hidden" links for speech readers at the start of the page so users can "skip to content" or "skip to navigation" etc.
- built-in alternative style sheets for high contrast, large fonts etc
- ability to "linearise" the content
- support for standard accessibility keys
- the ability for users to store the above preferences so they are loaded automatically next time

I am looking for an Adobe Dreamweaver Developer to create an extension that will allow the creation of Drupal themes from novice to advanced designs for any Dreamweaver user on the Macintosh or Windows operating systems. This extension must export drupal themes that are XHTML 1.0 Strict, CSS 2.0, and Section 508 compliant. Please contact me if you think you are the person for the job. And your bid on this project. The main requirement is that this Extension must be always up to date with Drupal's theming methods.

I am looking for an Adobe Dreamweaver Developer to create an extension that will allow the creation of Drupal themes from novice to advanced designs for any Dreamweaver user on the Macintosh or Windows operating systems. This extension must export drupal themes that are XHTML 1.0 Strict, CSS 2.0, and Section 508 compliant. Please contact me if you think you are the person for the job. And your bid on this project. The main requirement is that this Extension must be always up to date with Drupal's theming methods.

I've been working with some forms and something occurred to me. The "description" text always appears after the the form element throughout drupals UI.

Password
[input box]
Password must be between 8 and 10 characters and only include letters and numbers.

I don't have a lot of experience with screen readers, but the visitor would have the "help" text read to them after they've entered a password correct? Wouldn't this be a nuisance of sorts because they are getting the hint after the fact?

Is this a valid concern? I don't want to investigate a fix if this really isn't a problem.

I've been working with some forms and something occurred to me. The "description" text always appears after the the form element throughout drupals UI.

Password
[input box]
Password must be between 8 and 10 characters and only include letters and numbers.

I don't have a lot of experience with screen readers, but the visitor would have the "help" text read to them after they've entered a password correct? Wouldn't this be a nuisance of sorts because they are getting the hint after the fact?

Is this a valid concern? I don't want to investigate a fix if this really isn't a problem.

You might be interested in an experimental platform based on Drupal 5.1 that we are making for small linguistic entities. Basically it delivers the capability of speaking, along with reading, by introducing an added MP3 vocal file to all nodes and comments.

The english version is at http://eng.i-iter.org a first running example in the piemontese language is at http://pms.i-iter.org

We look for volunteer developers and translators to localize the platform into other languages, so feel free to add requests to join the alpha stage. Bear in mind that alpha really means alpha...

You might be interested in an experimental platform based on Drupal 5.1 that we are making for small linguistic entities. Basically it delivers the capability of speaking, along with reading, by introducing an added MP3 vocal file to all nodes and comments.

The english version is at http://eng.i-iter.org a first running example in the piemontese language is at http://pms.i-iter.org

We look for volunteer developers and translators to localize the platform into other languages, so feel free to add requests to join the alpha stage. Bear in mind that alpha really means alpha...

Okay, let's try and say it as a geek ;) The main idea would be to have:
- "everything is a cluster of nodes", meaning that we have but ANY traditional drupal content type can embed a streaming MP3 with the spoken text for the node, and/or a video.
- no fixed starting point (a node can be born as text and later add up video/picture/audio or as any of the other formats)
- a "multimedia cluster" should start to stream its audio content (if present) as soon as it's navigated to.
- a "cluster" should have audio links streaming audio help texts

Okay, let's try and say it as a geek ;) The main idea would be to have:
- "everything is a cluster of nodes", meaning that we have but ANY traditional drupal content type can embed a streaming MP3 with the spoken text for the node, and/or a video.
- no fixed starting point (a node can be born as text and later add up video/picture/audio or as any of the other formats)
- a "multimedia cluster" should start to stream its audio content (if present) as soon as it's navigated to.
- a "cluster" should have audio links streaming audio help texts