An accessible template for Drupal

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francesco_sardegna's picture

Good evening,
I started developing an accessible template for Drupal which I called "Visioni".

The work in progress is at the address

http://visioni.4elementi.info

the compressed file of the template at the address

http://4elementi.info/drupal/themes/visioni.zip

I an not new to Web Accessibility: I released an accessible template for Wordpress, one for Joomla 1.5 and one for PhpBB.

I would be enormously glad to keep on developing it with this community.

Francesco

Comments

There's really not enough information here

mgifford's picture

Francesco, thanks for your contribution. What version of Drupal did you build this on? What makes your theme better than Bartik or Genesis? Why would someone start with your theme?

Sorry for missing information

francesco_sardegna's picture

Good evening Mgifford,

I realize I described my intention too shortly.I am a volunteer.

The template "Accessibile" for Drupal 7.x, for now developed in Italian only, is only a rough draft.
As you noticed, Css is absent and the project is just started.
I copied all of the .tpl.php files in order to override them observing all of the Accessibility rules I observed in my previous templates for Wordpress, Joomla and PhpBB: the best practices requested by Italian Law 4/2004 and Wcag 2.0 Guidelines.

I would like to keep on the development after exposing the first steps to this Community, hoping someone may feel involved.

When the template is ready for the release it will show a very clean semantic code with correct hyerarchised headings.
It will work with Javascript disabled.
The page plot will be logic and usable.
The navigation will be easy as the website will be robust.
Navigation bars are at the end of the page.
Only essential informations and functions will be showed.
Color and brightness contrast will be suitable for daltonics and partially sighted users.
View will be resizable up to 200% without loss of information or disordered elements or horizontal scroll bar.
Skip content links will make navigation easy for non-sighted users.
Cognitive disabled users will be suported according to Criterion 3.3.6 of Wcag 2.0

Please, have a look at my last Gnu release, the accessible template for PhpBB:
www.accessiblephpbb.4elementi.info
or to www.opere.4elementi.info Wordpress blog.
Thanks, Francesco

Inspiration

francesco_sardegna's picture

As "Accessibile" is the name of the template for PhpBB I decided to change it in "Visioni".
I am working to make the code as clean as possible.

Unfortunately most functions are not overridable: for example I would like to remove the non-semantic tag "<div id="comment-body-add-more-wrapper">" from the form code, but the function "$wrapper_id = drupal_html_id($id_prefix . '-add-more-wrapper');" is in modules\field\field.form.inc and is not themable.

Have you got any ideas?
Thanks for our kind attention.

Why not contribute to existing projects?

mgifford's picture

Those are good goals, but frankly it sounds like your goal is too big for any individual to take on. Many of these goals are outside the ability of the theme layer to control.

For a goal of cross-CMS templates, it's worth looking at this effort by the Government of Canada - http://tbs-sct.ircan-rican.gc.ca/projects/gcwwwtemplates

Not perfect but the effort of many good accessibility aware professionals. Adding to this structure will surely be better.

Without a comparison with other Drupal themes, it's hard to know why yours would be better than Genesis. Critical mass is an important part of any successful software project.

Often there are issues with Core that just need to be brought up in the issue queue for the next version of Drupal (in this case Drupal 8). I don't know if this one can easily be re-written. I haven't needed to.

Worth looking at Stark to see what comes out of Core.

EDIT: Forgot to mention - https://github.com/sylus/Government-of-Canada-Drupal/

It's a good base with the WET theme.

Previous templates

francesco_sardegna's picture

Hallo MGifford,

once more thanks for your kind attention.

I am a stubborn volunteer, I achieved some very difficult aims in my previous templates.
The hardest was to satisfy criterion 3.3.6 of Wcag 2.0 at level AAA (I chose "A mechanism is available for reviewing, confirming, and correcting information before finalizing the submission").

I had to insert new pages in the Wordpress' hierarchy and in the module comment of Joomla to show, after pressing the send button, the form as filled by the user to let him review and cirrect the data and finally send them.
How many variables sent with the post method!

If you are patient, these are the links to my developments:

http://www.opere.4elementi.info il the Wordpress blog concerning the books I read, the music I listen to and so on;

http://www.vacanze.4elementi.info is the Joomla website of a summer location (sorry for showing a commercial website);

http://www.accessiblephpbb.4elementi.info is a PhpBB forum skinned with the template I created modifying old glorious Prosilver.

I think all of the templates achieve the aims I listed above.

My template.php has a lot of overriden functions, the collection is growing :-)
Drupal is far less steady than I thought two weeks ago.

Please follow the development at http://www.visioni.4elementi.info/ and - if you like - download the updated template at http://4elementi.info/drupal/themes/visioni.zip .

Francesco
Sardinia (Italy)

I do wish you luck...

mgifford's picture

But really, can't see investing any more of my time in this. You have to work with Drupal & with the community if you want something to take off. Simply imposing a theme that you say is great just doesn't cut it.

An important indication

francesco_sardegna's picture

To work with Drupal & with the Community is what I would like to do.
I hope to find the way to.

I imagined to collaborate proposing a theme but never imposing it.
Thank you for the right suggestion.

I keep on developing it because my curiosity leads me, just this.
The theme, in effect, doesn't exist yet :-)

I added the links to the previous themes just to demonstrate the goal is not impossible.

Is it a good idea to post the problems solved in the appropriate sections?

I hope to do something useful.

Francesco

There's lots to do

mgifford's picture

There's lots to do and lots more help is needed. However, there are already great themes like http://drupal.org/project/genesis that have a lot of accessibility features built into them. Looking at these first & giving suggestions for theme overrides that can be used to improve it further would be a much better use of your time than building a new theme from scratch.

Even just looking at the HTML5 & ARIA issues, there's a wealth of knowledge already developed in the Drupal community to learn from. As part of the goal of producing an accessible theme I do urge you to look into the issue queue.

It's also much better to post your theme as a project on Drupal.org. There's a process http://drupal.org/node/648898

But take some time first to learn what's already been done. Post some questions & get known by folks who are already have done a lot of work on this.

Right suggestion

francesco_sardegna's picture

Thanks MGifford,

I'll start from that to collaborate in Accessibility.

Downloaded and installed Genesis.

Have a good working day