Accessibility

Hi everybody,
As one of a BoF Accessibility participants on the last day of DrupalCon DC 2009, I decided to get involved and help out in what can be done to improve accessibility in Drupal. As a newbie, this is my very first post on this Accessibility Groups forum.

There are a couple of things (in order) that I'd like to share with you in what items can be implemented right away into Drupal. Right off the top of my head, of course.

At the documentation sprint at DrupalCon D.C. , we began the Accessibility documentation pages. They are currently at: http://drupal.org/node/394094

There are a number of ways people can help with this documentation:

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I'm using the Password Policy module to enforce strong passwords. When a user changes their password, the module displays a password strength indicator via Javascript. I'd like to add the ARIA live region role to the span that contains the strength indication and error message.

Hacking the Javascript is pretty simple. I'd like to consider the options for doing this the "best" way.

WebAIM has just published the initial results of its January 2009 survey of people who use screen readers and other forms of assistive technology (AT). Find the WebAIM survey's initial results here.

I have barely looked at this information, but a few points do jump out at me:

I would really like to understand this issue better - http://drupal.org/node/58941

As Webchick says "If 1/50th of the people complaining that this isn't fixed yet actually put some energy into reading the copious documentation cross-linked here and creating said patch, this probably would've made it into Drupal 4.7."

So, I'd like some other opinions about the difference between:

UPDATE: I started at http://drupal.org/project/accessible - Johnbarclay

I use a simple little module I wrote called accessibile to help with accessibility. I'm attaching it and looking for feedback on the general approach as well as the details of it. Here is the gist of the module:

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This is a helper module to make creating accessible websites easier. It is intended to:

• add functionality to allow authors to class block headings as "offscreen"

In a recent WCAG 2.0 presentation I was attending it was stressed that websites should not be using the same text to link to different URL's. So, with a generic Drupal blog when the teaser node produces 10 or so "Read more", "Add new comment" or "Send to friend" links, each going to unique URLs for the corresponding post it becomes very difficult for screen readers to navigate.

In an accessibility blog post I wrote about quick accessibility enhancements, I described an easy way to make the Read more link more descriptive. I believe it's also got some both SEO & click through advantages too.

This issue cropped up recently (I am not sure if it has been discussed elsewhere or even resolved). If it has please let me know. With the advent of version 6 a couple of my vision impaired friends have told me they find it much more difficult to use blocks in version 6. This has resulted in some of them going back to using version 5.*. This issue concerns the keyboard accessibility of blocks. i believe there has been a move towards a "drag and drop" model with blocks when re-ordering page content.

Views Filters with Exposed Select Lists

Problem: Long lists in exposed filters require control key + multi-selects which are subject to keyboard errors.

Solution: Convert select lists to scrolled check box items for specific filters (not globally)

Some Possible Approaches:
irc:drupal-support 6/30/2008
[18:30] http://drupal.org/project/views_checkboxes
[18:31] I've tried this using phptemplate_form_alter in my template.php
[18:31] http://drupal.org/node/138374#comment-545078