aGov - Australian Government standards compliant Drupal platform

Posted by owenlansbury on October 30, 2012 at 8:23am

Hi everyone,

We just announced a new Drupal publishing platform last week at the Web Directions and Gov 2.0 conferences that meets all Australian Government mandatory web requirements out of the box, with a big focus on WCAG 2.0 AA compliance, simple but powerful content management, and fully responsive mobile display.

Full details on the features are available on the promo site at http://www.agov.com.au

We're commencing a private beta testing program in the next couple of weeks, so if you're working for a government organisation and would like to help evaluate it, please sign up via the link above. It'll be freely available on Drupal.org as a downloadable distribution once it's ready for public release.

We'll post more details on GDO as they become available, but feel free to post questions here if you'd like to know more in the meantime.

Comments

Congratulations on your progress

Posted by BernieCram on October 30, 2012 at 10:31am

Well done Owen and to your team of course. It will be good to pull apart your compliance strategies, as it is something which we need to add to our essentials in the not for profit sector as well.

Damn that's awesome! Great

Posted by dgtlmoon on October 30, 2012 at 10:39am

Damn that's awesome! Great work guys!

http://dgtlmoon.com

This is welcome news.

Posted by imagenews on October 30, 2012 at 11:37am

This is welcome news. @BernieCram very interested in your NFP thoughts, are you developing similar for this market, too?

nah, just interested in how to add it to existing sites

Posted by BernieCram on October 30, 2012 at 11:34pm

Hi imagenews, improvements in that area have been on my list for some time but I seem to be able to shuffle them back.

I haven't seen how aGov works, but I wouldn't imagine there would be anything in it which would not be suitable for a nfp if you were developing new sites, (once it gets a release of course). I would hope that you would just get good stuff out of the box and add on what you need.

thanks

Posted by mossy2100 on October 30, 2012 at 11:43am

Thanks, Owen and Prev-Next

This may really help me as I'm working on a government project right now.

What I would like to know is how to incorporate the WCAG features into an existing D7 site, although tbh the site is brand new with not much done yet except theming.

Shaun

Thanks for your encouraging

Posted by owenlansbury on October 30, 2012 at 9:03pm

Thanks for your encouraging feedback everyone. The main thing we've focused on with compliance is the AGIMO mandatory web requirements outlined at http://webguide.gov.au

With WCAG, we are aiming to have a fully compliant install out of the box, and then a validation service for ongoing content checking to keep it compliant in the longer term. Mossy - a lot of the WCAG stuff is in the theme layer.

WCAG AA and Wai Aria Roles Questions

Posted by amaree on October 31, 2012 at 2:39am

Owen,

That is cool. Just a couple of questions, out of curiosity how do you control WYSIWYG output aka the theme can be WCAG AA compliant but the editors do not produce compliant code unless modified heavily and then even still not really. Also have you built in Wai-Aria roles for accessibility? and regarding the theme work, That means it is only WCAG AA compliant with your theme not if an agency wants to customise it?

Nice

Posted by pierrelord on October 31, 2012 at 2:54am

Owen and team,
This is awesome.
Thanks for releasing this back.
Really looking forward to trying this and helping to feedback where I can.
pl

Hey Aimee - a couple of

Posted by owenlansbury on October 31, 2012 at 3:01am

Hey Aimee - a couple of answers for you:

Yes, content editors will be able to mangle their sites if they start using non compliant code via WYSIWYG. We're building a WCAG validating web service with a Drupal module so they can do page by page or site wide WCAG validation as they change content.
The current focus is on the public view for WCAG compliance, with future releases focusing on ATAG compliance for the admin tools.
There's 7 WCAG compliant colour scheme themes included in the base install, and a starter kit for agencies to customise their own theme. They'll need to make sure these are WCAG compliant, and will be able to use the validator to do this.

Wai ARIA

Posted by amaree on November 1, 2012 at 12:47am

Owen,

ATAG is cool do you have the WAI-Aria roles written into your theme? these days I use a Boron base and then add extra WAI-Aria roles in and from what I can see there are no Roles or at least my screen reader did not pick these up? These can be added, if you need help here let me know and also have we posted it to the A11y team? You should post it there and get there ok etc and also make them aware of what is being worked on? Also the Drupal Groups (aka new Drupal Commons theme) is being built for Open Public and groups conversion how does this fit in with those goals?

Great stuff

Posted by totocol on October 31, 2012 at 3:08am

It looks great. Looking forward to trying it out. I've forwarded this to http://mediaaccess.org.au which I am sure will be very interested to hear more about it too.

Raul Caceres
www.simsolutions.net.au

WCAG Compliance

Posted by stephen ollman on October 31, 2012 at 11:13pm

Is this site (http://www.agov.com.au/) based on the starter kit?

Hi Stephen - the promo site

Posted by owenlansbury on November 1, 2012 at 12:03am

Hi Stephen - the promo site at http://www.agov.com.au is just on Drupal Gardens, so isn't responsive or WCAG compliant. The screenshots in the banner image are what the theme looks like (one of the 7 colour schemes). We'll be posting some more info up there soon.

Checking In. How is this going? (Standards and Validation)

Posted by NoblePromotions.com on February 26, 2013 at 3:09am

Hi Owen,

I am curious about how this is going...

I am interested in WCAG 2.0, standards and compliance.

The US govt has section 508 which is making some noise right now. I contacted drupal gardens / acquia to see what is being done about standards and html validation.

The response was
1) Accept that a few validation errors may occur on the Gardens site.....
2) Export and self-host your Gardens site as a regular Drupal 7 installation. That will give you access to all the files and allow you make changes that are not possible on the Gardens platform.
3) Use another CMS. Though with this option, you can find plenty of other CMS systems that have validation errors on current government sites.
4) Write your own code, so that you have complete control of the process.

I am wanting to have sites that are accessible those with disabilities...."Section 508 requires Federal electronic and information technology to be accessible to people with disabilities, including employees and members of the public"

From what I understand, this is the "Y2K of the decade"

Hi Wayne, We have a beta up

Posted by kim.pepper on February 26, 2013 at 11:34pm

Hi Wayne,

We have a beta up on http://drupal.org/project/agov right now for you to download and install.

We've been through an independent accessibility audit by Vision Australia, and have addressed most of the issues found. We're hoping to have a new beta released in the next week which addresses the remaining issues.

The main goal for this project is to meet Australian Government accessibility requirements, so we have put a lot of effort into getting it right.

Please take it for a test drive and let us know what you think!

Kim

PreviousNext
http://www.previousnext.com.au

Great Drupal and aGov plug in SMH

Posted by AndrewBoag on September 25, 2013 at 3:01am

Saw this great article in the SMH that is a great plug for Drupal and the aGov initiative - http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/government-it/opensource-platform-gains-pop...

Once again great work by PreviousNext!!!