D7 Accessibility Taskforce Meeting Summary (August 10, 2009)

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Everett Zufelt's picture
Posted by Everett Zufelt on August 11, 2009 at 5:09pm

On Monday, August 10, we had the second of three planned Drupal 7 accessibility taskforce conference calls. The goal of this call was to discuss open accessibility issues, and to brainstorm and build consensus on appropriate solutions.

Present on the Call

Apologies

  • Valeria Brigatti

Hiding elements and making elements invisible

Issue: Defining System-Wide Approaches to Remove, Make Invisible & Push Content Off-screen with CSS

Between the first accessibility taskforce call and this call two system level classes were committed to Drupal 7 core. The first class (.element-hidden) can be used to hide content from all users. The second class (.element-invisible) can be used to hide content from all but screen-reader users.

Consensus was formed around the idea of providing a system level class to hide elements, but for those elements to be shown on focus.

Required and Invalid Form Fields

Issue: Use of red color to indicate a field which is required and was left blank or not filled out properly is not accessible

The importance of communicating information with more than colour alone was discussed, in particular as this principle applies to indicating required and invalid form fields. Several methods of providing information about the state of a form field were discussed:

  • Label colour
  • Label suffix character or icon (* for required, or ! for invalid)
  • Label error text
  • Error message (easily located
  • Links from error message to invalid form fields
  • Autofocus in first invalid form field

It was agreed that this was an issue, but no consensus was reached on which methodology was most appropriate to resolve this issue.

Date Field Labeling

Issue: Use fieldset and legend for date field

Several methods of labeling the date field were discussed:

  • Fieldset and legend with a separate label for each field
  • Fieldset and legend with label for first form field and title for subsequent form fields
  • Label for first form field and title for subsequent form fields
  • Off-screen labels
  • Titles alone

"Read more" and other repeating links

Issue Include node title in "Read more" link for better accessibility and SEO

No consensus reached on this issue. Some participants felt that repeating links should be replaced with links which include contextual link text. Other participants felt that the current implementation of repeating links (such as "Read more" and "X Comments" were reasonably understandable given their context within the page, such as the implementation on http://groups.drupal.org/accessibility.

RSS Feed Icon Alt Text

Issue: theme_feed_icon could use more meaningful alt text

The default implementation for the Drupal RSS feed icon was discussed. In the default implementation the alt attribute for the icon is set to "Syndicate content" and the title attribute for the icon can be set by passing a string to the theme_feed_icon() function. This causes problems for many users particularly screen-reader and keyboard only users, who normally do not have access to the title attribute, which is almost always more specific and meaningful than "Syndicate content".

Consensus was reached regarding the alt and title attributes for the feed icon.

  • Require an alt attribute to be passed to theme_feed_icon as a parameter
  • Allow a title attribute to be passed to theme_feed_icon as a parameter
  • If there is resistance to removing the required nature of the title attribute, then set the title attribute equal to the alt attribute if the title attribute is not provided (preserving the tooltip in Mozilla and Webkit)

Use of alt and title attributes with images

Issue: theme_image accepts both alt and title attributes as parameters which can cause problems for screen-readers

It was discussed that the title attribute serves no purpose for image elements other than to provide a tooltip. Information in the title attribute is not readily available to most screen-reader and keyboard only users.

Consensus was achieved on providing thorough and clear documentation on what the different purpose and use of the alt and title attribute are, and who can and cannot access the information in these attributes.

Ability to embed invisible text within links

Issue: l() does not accept a parameter for supplemental text for screen-readers

There was general consensus that the ability to embed invisible text into link text is desirable. An example of this would be including "selected tab" into the active local task.

Modify default page titles

Issue: Include more contextual information in page title

The lack of clarity, and potential repetition, of the default page titling method "node title | page title" was discussed.

Consensus was reached on providing at least one additional level of context to page titles by including the next higher level breadcrumb in the page title. For example a breadcrumb of "Home > Products > Shoes > Specialty Shoes" would translate into the page title "Speciality Shoes | Shoes | site title".

The idea of adding the local task (Edit, View, etc.) to the page title was also discussed.

Next Meeting

The next Drupal 7 Accessibility Taskforce conference call will be:

Monday, August 24, 11:00am (eastern U.S., -05:00UTC)

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