All you WCAG nuts this is the place for you: how to make Drupal more accessible. Hints, tips, discussion and patch proposals.
Free Drupal Themes Wanted!
Hi!
I'm peach, or Jurriaan, from All Drupal Themes and I'm having some trouble finding good themes to port and release to the community. I've already ported several themes but it turns out there were some problems:
-Apparently people were more interested in 3-column themes
-Some of the themes were not deemed useful at all
-Most good looking themes I find are Creative Commons licensed, which makes sense from the designers point of view, but unfortunately they are not allowed on drupal.org/project/Themes. I was reassured when I signed up for a cvs account that I must not upload CC2.5 licensed themes, only GPL.
I've created this post to communicate with the Drupal community, for whom I make the themes, and hopefully some people have good ideas for themes to be ported to drupal! If anyone has a GPL theme in mind please post it in the comments sections.
If you know of a gorgeous CC licensed design, it's also eligible for a free drupal port but I will put it up with my free drupal themes department but it won't show up on drupal.org/project/Themes.
Looking forward to your input!
JR
any ideas on GHOP task (or tasks) focussed on accessibility?
I've started writing a task focused on accessibility for the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. Then I remembered about this group. I'm no accessibility expert, so I thought I'd post a link to the draft of the task, in case anyone would like to provide feedback.
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New theme for accessibility
Hi All,
I have recently uploaded a new Drupal theme, called Flexible. One of the goals was to build accessibility features into the system. These include:
- "hidden" links for speech readers at the start of the page so users can "skip to content" or "skip to navigation" etc.
- built-in alternative style sheets for high contrast, large fonts etc
- ability to "linearise" the content
- support for standard accessibility keys
- the ability for users to store the above preferences so they are loaded automatically next time
Are form elements description text in the wrong place?
I've been working with some forms and something occurred to me. The "description" text always appears after the the form element throughout drupals UI.
Password
[input box]
Password must be between 8 and 10 characters and only include letters and numbers.
I don't have a lot of experience with screen readers, but the visitor would have the "help" text read to them after they've entered a password correct? Wouldn't this be a nuisance of sorts because they are getting the hint after the fact?
Is this a valid concern? I don't want to investigate a fix if this really isn't a problem.
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an experimental platform
You might be interested in an experimental platform based on Drupal 5.1 that we are making for small linguistic entities. Basically it delivers the capability of speaking, along with reading, by introducing an added MP3 vocal file to all nodes and comments.
The english version is at http://eng.i-iter.org a first running example in the piemontese language is at http://pms.i-iter.org
We look for volunteer developers and translators to localize the platform into other languages, so feel free to add requests to join the alpha stage. Bear in mind that alpha really means alpha...
Read moreSome tech spexx
Okay, let's try and say it as a geek ;) The main idea would be to have:
- "everything is a cluster of nodes", meaning that we have but ANY traditional drupal content type can embed a streaming MP3 with the spoken text for the node, and/or a video.
- no fixed starting point (a node can be born as text and later add up video/picture/audio or as any of the other formats)
- a "multimedia cluster" should start to stream its audio content (if present) as soon as it's navigated to.
- a "cluster" should have audio links streaming audio help texts
Our problem is analphabetism
Our problem is analphabetism. That is, people who cannot read/write in their own languages. It may sound a pretty weird audience, but actually it’s tens of millions of people in Europe (almost no minority language is taught in schools). Same technology maybe pretty useful if used to contact reent migrants who probably won’t be much fluent in the local written language, while they already may communicate orally.
Read moreAccessible Drupal examples
I would like to show my local county and library officials examples of government websites that are accessible and use Drupal. I am looking for full or partial ada compliance.
I surfed a City website in Florida that was partially accessible (it had "quick" or "fast" (?) links) but I can't find it again.
Thanks.
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Navigation for blind people: "Skip to main"
Blind people, when using screen readers or refreshable braille displays, must read web pages sequentially. Typically this means plowing through the page navigation before reaching the main content.
We can provide helpful links, links which are noticeable only to people using non-visual browsers, which allow them to skip over the navigation. It's really easy.
<a class="accessible" href="#bmain" name="btop"><img src="/files/spacer.gif" width="1" height="1" alt="Skip to main" /></a>
Do you design for handhelds?
Theme site set up
There is set up a small testing site for themes at http://theme.drupaler.net/.
I've tried to install all available themes (4.7.2) and categorized them according to their validatation against "Markup", "CSS" and "WCAG".
All Installed themes can be easily tested from a "Test [$theme]" link. If you are registered you are able to vote for a theme.
If a theme is missing, you should post a story with the [$theme].tar.gz
CSS Error & Warning free: ! or ?
As I've started "W3C compliant CSS"-issue (http://drupal.org/node/70296) as a wish, it was the first one in the chain of validitaion.
The main critism of warning-free css-validation is the "inherit" argument, which changes nothing visible, but is needed by W3C-validation (warning free).
In my opinion there is a difference between an "explicit defined default" and an "undefined default", cause the "explicit defined" says: Yes, I'm sure, that I want to do this.
As we are experienced webusers, we know that the warning of "undefined color" doesn't make visible sense. But it's one of my most-hated questions customers asks me twice a month: "Why does your site so much validation warnings, although you are working active for accessibility?".
What is the status?
I'd be interested in a compiled document "bullet-pointing" status on Drupal accessibilities. What standards does it adhere to - how much? What remains to be done to make Drupal and whatever theme fully accessible according to this and that standard?
Would that be a good starting point?
Does it exist yet?
