Accessibility documentation for themers

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jeff1970's picture

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.

One thing I found really hard when getting invloved with Accessibility is the sheer bredth of the information and that it can be hard to find simple strait forward task based tutorials or "how tos". Lets give themers some tutorials such as "How to include ARIA roles" and "How to include an accessible Skip to Main Content" link etc.

For the main docs I'll get the ball rolling and say we should at minimun include (in no particular order):

  • Headings - proper use/nesting of heading elements
  • Skip links
  • ARIA roles
  • Hiding Content overview
  • Color and Contrast
  • Font sizing
  • Standards and Validation services
  • Tools

Anything else you can chime in with would be great:)

UPDATE: The documentation written since this was first posted can be found here - http://drupal.org/node/464472

Comments

more suggestions

kat3_drx's picture

This is terrific! I might be jumping the gun here, but a few other areas that we might also cover could be:

  • Providing text alternatives for images and other non-text content
  • How to handle time-based and live streaming content
  • Color cues
  • Language markup for screen readers (like acronym, etc)
  • Using form markup (fieldsets, etc)
  • Ways to preserve all functionality from the keyboard
  • maybe also tips that designers can encounter in the field but you don't see too often in WCAG docs, like accommodating "a:hover", properly annotating the "skip nav" links, etc

Also love the idea of the tutorials. That could be a great way to break down the guidelines one by one (or even further to avoid overwhelming the designers, important techniques for each guideline one by one).

This is great

mgifford's picture

Would be good to get a page up there quickly that a few of us could then work on improving. Would be important to tie it into the existing accessibility documentation (or separate out the existing theming references) - http://drupal.org/node/394094

I think getting some good documentation up may also help get some of the theme patches here into core - http://drupal.org/node/364629

Mike

OpenConcept

Documentation Pages Progressing Well

mgifford's picture

jmburnz has already made a very good start with the documentation here - http://drupal.org/node/464472

I've added a few elements too, but it certainly needs more input. Please take a look at the accessibility pages and see what it is you'd like theme developers to know about accessibility.

Mike

OpenConcept | CLF 2.0 | Podcasting

Looks great!

kat3_drx's picture

It looks great! I added some content on the "Audio & Video" section and will write up some stuff for the "Interactive" and "Color and Contrast" sections as well.

Added the first tutorial -

jeff1970's picture

Added the first tutorial - Skip navigation techniques http://drupal.org/node/467976

I could go a lot further and show a whole heap of CSS techniques I have developed but I wanted to keep it reasonably "un-overwhelming".

Excellent Start

mgifford's picture

This is terrific! Great to see such a detailed tutorial. It's a great example to follow for others in our community.

Mike

OpenConcept | CLF 2.0 | Podcasting

Accessibility

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