Accessible Web-design with Screen-readers and Druapl7.x

Events happening in the community are now at Drupal community events on www.drupal.org.
KeithH's picture

Hello folks.
First of all, I do not know if you folks can even help me out, so I thought I'd ask here.
I don't have money to higher a full-time web designer, but I need as much assistance as I can get in designing accessible websites with Drupal7.x.
Everything from incorperating same page links, to tips that range from visually compeling stuff as well.
I'm also concerned with Drupal7 as far as how well W3C designs regardless of the HTMl standard in use passes the validation processes.
Any help would be much appreciated!

I'm still trying to get used to D7.x itself, since I have never developed accessible sites with it before.

Any help is appreciated from sighted and visually impaired screenr eader users a like.
Note: I only have Windows7 for now, no Apple stuff, so can't test for cross-platform accessibility.

Thanks!

Comments

Hire a Consultant

mgifford's picture

There are a bunch of us that have gone through great efforts to build accessibility into Drupal 7 & now Drupal 8. Starting with D7 you're in a pretty good place for accessibility, but you're still going to have to do extra work if you want to ensure that your site is accessibile or passes WCAG 2.0 standards.

Drupal generally validates well against the W3C, but again it does depend on what you want to do. If you are wanting a nice HTML5 site and have enabled RDFa then W3C's validators still aren't going to be a lot of use. You get into further complications if you want to add ARIA to your site to provide additional navigational support.

There are lots of great resources on testing sites across all browsers, but it either takes time or money to do it properly. Ultimately you needs someone who knows what they are doing if you want to make sure it's done right. Accessibility is kinda like electrical work. You can probably get a friend to help you install a new fuse box in your house fast and cheap, but it's likely not going to pass your local building code, will likely need to be replaced if you ever sell your house and might well be the source of a short which burns your house to the ground.

EDIT: I switched metaphors in trying to explain this. I originally started with a plumbing example, but it's the same thing. It's complicated and it will either take a lot of time or resources to do it right.

Accessibility

Group notifications

This group offers an RSS feed. Or subscribe to these personalized, sitewide feeds: