Posted by donalfitz on February 23, 2012 at 10:49pm
Hello all,
I trust it is in order to post this question here. If not, please accept my apologies and feel free to direct me to a more appropriate group/forum.
I am assisting in the design of a site for the Visually Impaired Computer Society based in Ireland. One of the requirements is that the site design cater for those with residual vision; namely those who are visually impaired. My question is a simple one. Is there a module, or suite of modules available for Drupal 7.x which will:
- enable us to change the styles on the site;
- enable us to change colour contrasts;
- enable the font to be increased/decreased.
- Anything else you think we might need to do.
I'm grateful for any input,
Dónal
Comments
I'd take the approach of
I'd take the approach of designing the site so that anyone (regardless of visual or other impairment) can access the site. This mainly comes back to your HTML and CSS, specifically, ensure:
I'd avoid text resizing widgets, and instead, educate users on how to resize text using their browser. Also, if a large group of your users have a vision impairment, you might want to consider designing the site with large text and high contrast colours by default.
To answer your original question: there are a couple of modules which allow users to switch stylesheets -- I haven't personally used any of these though. Changing stylesheets should satisfy your requirement to change styles, font sizes, and colour contrasts.
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@daniel_nitsche
we've done all of that.
Many thanks for the input. We've done all of that but several of the people who are part of the user-base have actually requested this feature. The site is being designed by a team with a high representation of visually impaired/blind developers. We were pretty happy with the way it had turned out in terms of the colour contrast, font, text size etc but given the request from the users we said we'd include it if it wasn't too much trouble.
I agree with your comments though.
I used the style switcher
I used the style switcher module back in 2008 in drupal5 exactly for your same purposes. It did work, but I have never used that since then,
One Size Doesn't Fit All
Thanks for posting this question. We've been using one for the last year - http://openconcept.ca - and I'm not sure who it has benefited. Would be useful to be able to get better stats on that. However, I do believe in being able to personalize websites as some people are going to be able to get more out of it if they are able to change basic elements.
I've been trying following examples of accessibility leaders like:
http://www.copious.co.uk
http://www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility/
Came across this #D6 site recently too - http://scope.org.uk - that is using page style switcher.
But again, without stats to know what is being used or useful it's hard to know which combinations of options to offer. The text only example for instance in the scope site above really doesn't seem to work. I'd be opposed to offering that one.
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OpenConcept | Twitter @mgifford | Drupal Security Guide
Interesting response.
Thanks very much for posting your experiences. I took a look at your Openconcept.ca site and it is this type of thing we'd like to do. Would you mind going into some detail on how you went about including the style switcher and contrast changer?
Many thanks in advance.
Ask me again in April
I might be able to get to writing up a blog post in April/May about it. Right now I'm too swamped.
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OpenConcept | Twitter @mgifford | Drupal Security Guide