Help visually impaired people publish online through documentation and working examples of friendly Web sites
Help visually impaired people take control of their own Web sites by helping them administer the sites and create their own content.
Pick a specific community site for visually impaired people and convert the site to Drupal using the best available practices.
Document what works and set up demonstration sites to show the techniques.
Document what does not work, set up demonstration sites to test changes to Drupal, and feed information back to Drupal developers including theme developers.
Focus on making the administerable by a visually impaired person. Start at the point where the administrator first logs in. Add options to select additional modules and themes from the Admin screen. Build installation wizards to to take the administrator through common tasks in logical sequence.
Make content creation easier. Work on a WYSIWYM or WYSIWYG editor/module that works easily with screen readers.
Make content easier to edit. The current content list needs sorting and selection by keywords.
Set up guidelines for theme compatibility with screen readers. There are already themes with all the right attributes but without explanation of why. Select the best of the current themes. Document what works and what does not. Set up demonstration pages, guidelines, and bring together a test panel of visually impaired people to test demonstration themes.
This project will bring visually impaired people into publishing publishing online and building new sites to service their community.
The results will be available to everyone to improve every site.
One year to develop. Keep everything online for three years so people have time to propagate the ideas to their code and documentation. I will target Drupal 7 and 8.
Example sites. I already have examplea.net, examplea.org and other names registered. I will set up a separate VPS specifically for the examples. The documentation can then feed into the general Drupal site documentation as the changes are adopted.
AU$30000 the first year. AU$10000 for each of year 2 and 3 to maintain active live demonstration sites and apply the latest updates for Drupal, modules, and themes.
Ical feed
Puslished
Is there a reason why this was 'private' and not tagged as a proposal?
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http://ken.therickards.com/
Thank you for changing it
I forget where you change the tags and what defaults I might have set.
petermoulding.com/web_architect
Not just passive I hope...
There's obviously a huge need for this type of work. I'd like to see more about how you intend to bring your findings back to the community. Specifically, rather than the site simply being a passive example, I'd like to see plans to create articles & tutorials to help developers, and even bring patches into Drupal and its contributed modules as you find things that can help develop other sites for the visually impaired.
Aaron Winborn
Drupal Multimedia (book, in October!)
AaronWinborn.com (blog)
Advomatic (work)
Ok, read over it again, and
Ok, read over it again, and see you do plan to do some of that. It looks good; I'd just like to see more of a documented plan.
Aaron Winborn
Drupal Multimedia (book, in October!)
AaronWinborn.com (blog)
Advomatic (work)
USD
Funding needs to be in US dollars
Make it US$
The AU $ fluctuates between US$1.00 and US$0.80 then our local banks take a cent or two in their conversion then they add a fee. Just make the AU$ a US$. If the conversion on the day does deliver the odd extra dollar, I will run more training sessions for the relevant community.
petermoulding.com/web_architect
Usability testing
Would this tie into the usability testing at all?
testing by the relevant community
This project aims at testing by the relevant community through them building and using sites. The resulting documentation and guidelines could then be tested by existing means to ensure the general public understand the documentation. The output from this project could flow to the usability testing project to highlight any differences that conflict. The same process happens when you bring in RTL and other major changes. The users focus on the change they need. They feed their changes back into the general community for dissection, discussion, discord, drama, delight, documentation.
petermoulding.com/web_architect
I would love to see this
I would love to see this work move forward.
Some of the questions I have:
As Rob Loach suggests above, have you looked into tying in to any of the ongoing Usability work?
I would also like to see some specific scenarios addressed; for example, a content type creation utility, or a views creation utility (like http://drupal.org/project/simpleviews), or ??
In some ways, I could envision this project looking to streamline admin tasks in a way that helped all users administer Drupal more efficiently. While the goal would be to make sites easier to set up and administer for people with visual impairments, it potentially could benefit sighted people as well.
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
Synergy with other projects
There are lots of projects that could have synergy with this project and I have to make sure the extras do not interfere with access using screenreaders and other technology.
The Comment Preview box on this page is a useful active extra that helps most of us produce better comments quicker. If you were posting to this group using a screen magnifier, you would see the comment box or the Comment Preview box but not both. If you were listening to this page while typing, you would want to hear your typing or the preview bbuutt nnoott bbootthh..
You would also want the settings in your profile so that you get the same result every time you visit. The ideal would be to pass the profile information when using OpenID so that the one setting helps the person on all the related sites.
petermoulding.com/web_architect
Don't forget low vision
I've done a lot of work on projects like this (many many years of work with IBM and other organizations trying to make the web more accessible), and a common problem is assuming all visually impaired people use screen readers. There are actually many more people who have 'low vision' than there are who are blind. Low vision people do not use screen readers usually, they can see the page, but they need to be able to scale the font size up to a very large size without breaking the page layout, and they need that large font size to work in form elements as well as regular text. They also may need to be able to zoom in on images and blow them up so they can see them better, and can't see the tiny icons used in some themes.
I don't know what your plans for that are, but thought I should check. If you don't plan to address those kinds of issues and only are interested in people using screen readers, you may want to clarify that.
Screen magnifiers
I know some of the screen magnifiers, both hardware and software, which is the reason for one of my previous comments about the Comment Preview box. Screen layout for extreme magnification is part of the project. Some themes have adjustable font size but there is no documentation about taking them up to extra large sizes or reducing the number of columns to fit the magnifiers. I hope to cover the full range from the top of the font size adjustment up to the three letters per page style of reading.
petermoulding.com/web_architect
And another common vision
And another common vision impairment is color-blindness, so you have to be aware of background-foreground color combinations that are not distinguishable by people who are color blind, or using color in ways that will break things for people who can't see the color.
And contrast is another issue for low-vision people -- they may need more than the usual contrast between background and foreground colors.
Contrast yes, colour not in this project.
High contrast yes, I will include it. Colour blindness will have to be a separate project because there are several combinations of colour blindness and because many of the modern themes let you change colour combinations. Changing themes to provide a high contrast option is in scope. Changing themes to provide the right colours for each type of colour deficiency would require a lot more time, many more examples, and someone with each type of colour blindness to volunteer as a final tester. I suggest a separate project and will propose one, perhaps as a followup from the current project.
petermoulding.com/web_architect
Much needed
Accessibility improvements to Drupal are much needed and I love the idea of using a community website for visually impaired users as the place to help make it happen!
A few comments and suggestions:
The proposal will be stronger if you identify the community group or site and if a member of the group signs on the the proposal as a supporter. Do you know the group yet? Demonstrating their commitment will show you've got the pieces in place to make this a success.
You might need to identify a budget to compensate the test subjects for providing testing and feedback. That's definitely true if you're going to hire professionals--for example, here in Urbana-Champaign and at the University of Illinois we have some of the leaders of our country's higher ed accessibility movement and they provide professional accessibility evaluations and written recommendations. I'd be glad to introduce you as well, if that's helpful.
You could propose to have either the community website or Drupal core meet certain accessibility standards. In the U.S. we have federal Section 508, W3C WCAG 1 and 2, plus in the State of Illinois we have the new IITAA 2008 law.
Best wishes for this important project! Cheers,
Brandon
State law
Hello Brandon,
I have no allowance for testing compliance with state law. If you can start a local project to get local funding for testing compliance with your state law, you can test the sites I set up and the results can go straight into the "how to" documentation.
petermoulding.com/web_architect