Join our monthly meeting of the Waterloo Region Drupal User Group meetup.
Date: Thursday, March 15th, 2017
Time: 19:00 to 21:00
Location: The Working Centre, 58 Queen Street S., Kitchener
For our March meeting, we have a double feature ... both focused on accessibility ...
WCAG 2.0
The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act sets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 as requirements for the websites of many public and private organizations in Ontario. The official WCAG 2.0 documents are over 900 pages long, expansive and complex. Based on a close reading of the documents, Mark Weiler will guide attendees through the overarching features and some often overlooked concepts. This introduction will touch on important concepts like "accessibility supported", "success criteria", and "sufficient techniques". Implications for Drupal will be discussed as well.
Mark Weiler is the Web & User Experience librarian at Wilfrid Laurier University Library. He has strong interest in WCAG 2.0 and has presented on the topic at the Ontario Library Association. Mark is presently organizing a national WCAG community of practice through the Canadian Association of Professional Academic Librarians. Mark also has a strong commitment to freedom of information laws. He has given oral testimony to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy, and Ethics.
Centre for Equitable Library Access (CELA)
CELA, the Centre for Equitable Library Access, provides alternative format books and magazines to print disabled patrons of Canada’s public libraries. This online service is going though a major refresh, and as part of this, the website is moving to the Drupal content management system. This talk, by Bob Dodd from CNIB, will focus on the activities being undertaken to ensure the site is accessible both to library patrons, and internally to print disabled staff who support it. We will cover accessible UX design processes in use, the web design challenges involved, and specific work being undertaken to make the site and underlying Drupal theme meet the requirements of WCAG 2.0.
Bob Dodd has been the Library Web Developer at CNIB in Toronto for over four years, where he supports CELA's online digital library for print disabled patrons (CELA is the Centre for Equitable Library Access).
Bob came to CNIB with ten years academic research in accessible user interface design, and a further 15 years commercial experience with mobile UI design for Nokia Research and Siemens. He has published papers on techniques for adaptive user interfaces (The CISNA model of accessible adaptive hypermedia), and a model for profiling human capability (User capability in an adaptive world).
Outside of the world of accessibility, Bob owns and runs Objects and Ideas, a Toronto-based award-winning design practice with his husband. One of their latest designs, the Wye Rocker, won IIDEX Woodshop 2017 and was featured in Toronto Life in January 2018.
Meetings for the Waterloo Region Drupal Users Group happen on the third Thursday of each month (except for July, August and December). The meetings are held at The Working Centre, at 58 Queen Street South in Kitchener, between 19:00 and 21:00.
If you have a Drupal related topic, or showcasing a web site or a module that you built with Drupal, please contact us, and we will arrange for a talk.