Posted by greggles on May 15, 2009 at 9:18pm
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.
Has anyone done a review of core/contrib with these standards in mind? It would be great to start with the popular modules list and review a few at a time. I imaging that most module maintainers would like to be compliant but are just unaware of any ways that they are not following these guidelines.
Comments
There is a start in the
There is a start in the "Accessibility and Drupal" documentation (http://drupal.org/node/394094), but not much. With the core, Mike Gifford is maitaining a list of core patches for accessibility for 6 and 7. As with core, much of the work would be offering patches to illustrate problems.
www.johnbarclay.com
Thanks John, I started a bit
Thanks John,
I started a bit of a list here for core and contributed modules:
http://drupal.org/node/364629
http://drupal.org/node/425494
I haven't done a lot of work on http://www.section508.gov/ compliance. Webaim has a good checklist though that might be worth going through for sure:
http://www.webaim.org/standards/508/checklist
I don't think that that we can claim that Drupal core is WAI compliant. Certainly I haven't heard of anyone going through this set of components and evaluating Drupal's functionality:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/components.php
More later, but this is a start.
This area certainly needs more work.
Mike
OpenConcept | CLF 2.0 | Podcasting
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OpenConcept | Twitter @mgifford | Drupal Security Guide
Accessible modules documentation
since tables don't work in the documentation area, I'm requesting the documentaion team to remove: http://drupal.org/node/394458
And use http://drupal.org/node/425494 as the starting point for contrib modules and accessiblity. If someone evaluates a particular contrib module in eonough detail to merit a child page, they can link from http://drupal.org/node/425494 to a child page.
The list of modules could get quite long, so I think we should title the modules as: Administration Menu (admin_menu) so its more searchable from the browser.
www.johnbarclay.com
Sounds Good
John - these changes sound good. Do you have all the rights you need to make them? It would make it easier to access.
greggles - agreed that it would be nice to have a review of the top 25 modules. Just need to find the people to do that and report it in a systematic function. By reporting accessibility issues in projects, tagging them, and adding them to the accessibility issues page above it will help the community make this a priority.
As far as W3C accessibility standards, a big one that we need to handle is WCAG 2.0 & ATAG 1.0 - http://groups.drupal.org/node/18595
Dividing these up between what Drupal needs to do to be more accessible (like ensure only proper use of display:none; & producing accessible forms) and what Drupal can do to help users produce better content (stronger alt tag policies, proper use of heading tags).
I gave a talk on Drupal Accessibility issues earlier this week - http://hosting3.epresence.tv/fosslc/1/watch/80.aspx
Mike
--
OpenConcept | Twitter @mgifford | Drupal Security Guide
ATAG2.0 Call for comments
ATAG2.0 is slowly making progress on its way towards becoming the current recommendation, and the latest step on that road is the publication of a new working draft today.
The call for comments information is at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2009AprJun/0122.html
If you haven't read it/commented on it before, or even if you have, please take a look and consider giving some feedback.
We're hoping to go to Last Call on this in the next month or so (depending on the/any comments received) at which point it'll be pretty close to what will be the final standard, so if you've got any concerns about the implementability of the guidelines, now's the time to voice them so we can make any necessary changes.
Ann
http://www.d7ux.org/accessibility
http://www.pixeldiva.co.uk
Ann
http://www.d7ux.org/accessibility
http://www.pixeldiva.co.uk