Accessibility core conversation at DrupalCon Portland

These are the original notes in Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/a/acquia.com/document/d/1FPDXnemabQT1UyvMSvrMNgK...

I've ported the content of that document here. It is listed right below.

Questions

Recommendations for acceptance testing tools for accessibility (see answers below --and are there license fees as with JAWS?)

Notes

http://wave.webaim.org/toolbar/

• Accessibility is something that should be in core, not contrib! <-ok to say ‘also in contrib’?
• Accessibility guidelines:
  • We say we support:
    • WCAG
    • ATAG
  • But we don't know if we do.
• Methods
  • Full review of core admin pages
  • Full review of core templates
  • Scoreboard of elements and grade for each one
  • We could arrange the work just like we did for the HTML5 conversions or TWIG conversions.(we want to specify a definition of done)
• Tools:
  • WAVE toolbar for Firefox
  • Markup validators
  • QUAIL module, perhaps baked into TestSwarm
  • Automated testing?
  • WYSIWYG integration?
  • Publishing workflow integration
• Do the guidelines really cover our complex use cases?
• Four principles of accessibility:
• Perceivable — able to see something's there
• Operable — able to take action on something
• Understandable
• Robust — make sure they are consistant
• What needs work?
  • Views! (dialog UI)
  • Fields
  • Content creation
  • Blocks UI
  • Standard aural UI for field states?
• We need aural UI designers, keyboard UI designers, mobile UI designers, etc.
  • We have the opportunity to be pioneers in this space.
  • We are looking for a champion of aural UI
• Short-term plan:
  • Testing new, existing stuff.
  • Locating diversity in developers… we scratch our own issues.
• Do we need an initiative?
  • People should get together to talk about these issues and work on them

Volunteers

Nick Young, North Carolina State University -- will help where i can, also, Greg Kraus our University IT Accessibility Coordinator (@usaussie & @gdkraus)
Kevin Miller from Cal State Monterey Bay & quailjs maintainer - using QUAIL & CI to bake a11y into qa.drupal.org, or something similar (kevee on d.o)
Matt Parker, Myplanet Digital ( http://drupal.org/user/536298 )
Misc tip: when I was trying to learn how to make a site accessibile, one of the most informative things for me was to open the site in Safari and hit Command+F5 (to start VoiceOver), then learning to navigate around the site using VoiceOver (the wizard is really helpful)
Kay VanValkenburgh --personally without accessibility expertise, but access to users and experts who are eager to participate
Terrill Thompson, Technology Accessibility Specialist at University of Washington (terrill on d.o., @terrillthompson)
Mike Gifford, D8 Accessibility Maintainer, OpenConcept Consulting Inc. (@mgifford)
Organizations
List of accessibility orgs using Drupal http://groups.drupal.org/node/268908

Ideas

Documentation pages on drupal.org providing “how to make your module/theme/etc. accessible” tips for developers, designers, etc.

Links

WCAG Accessibility Guidelines
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/

Simplified WCAG Checklist from WebAIM
http://webaim.org/standards/wcag/checklist
Side-by-Side Comparison of Section 508 and WCAG
http://www.jimthatcher.com/sidebyside.htm

Questions asked

Pointing out Universal Design. This is a great effort, not only for blind users or motor limitations using websites, but also for the future of Drupal. (Demonstrating VoiceOver on an iPhone.) If Drupal were to support Universal Design, then we’d be the first CMS on new device form factors! (Universal Design lets people with our without disabilities use the same devices/buildings/vehicles, etc.)
Q: Aural design is one thing, but also touch. What about voice input? How can we prepare Drupal for that?
— Dragon Naturally speaking is the big one, but not known if there is anybody integrating Drupal with that.
— Ideally, Google Now like support in Drupal!
— post-question note: Apple products include voice recognition (limited to their devices for now, but should not be considered a long-term hurdle to voice input)
A: Mike Gifford said that Dragon Naturally speaking is one option. Everett Zufelt has reached out to them, but that resulted in a dead end.
Q: Biggest practical struggle is: editors creating alt tags and so on. Clients don’t want to deal with accessibility, and don’t want to pay for it.
A: falcon03 brought up this idea of an error log during content authoring, so that if you had a workflow where the content creator didn’t create the optimal output, then an editor could fix that. The two [?] of content creation aren’t well-defined enough yet to understand those responsibilities.
Q: About known knowns and unknown knowns. Working at university. I have a usability lab where students can be using Jaws and we record that. Would that be valuable?
A: Yes, super valuable!
I’m responsible for accessible content. QUAIL has the ability to integrate with TestSwarm now, to do unit testing. But the challenge is to go beyond accessibility specs but also test best practices. Something like qa.drupal.org for people writing interfaces would also be very useful, to list best practices and provide tutorials.
Q: I just had an audit done on my site, and was thinking about what we could automate. I noticed a lot just can’t be automated: color contrast, navigation order. A lot of it depends on design. So does a11y mostly depend on better informed designers, or …?
A: Great question, I’m not sure how to answer this. There’s indeed only so far we can take automation, and then comes education.
Just wanted to add: automated testing only gets you so far. Great to identify low hanging fruit, but we also need to engage with the people in the community who have the expertise. There’s a lot of kinds of disabilities that are blocking people from having access to your website. The blind community is certainly one but it’s not the only one. Cognitive disabilities, learning disabilities, multiple disabilities.

Summary

A lot of the standards are still formative. It would be interesting/possible to have the ATAG/WC3 reference the Drupal implementation as the reference. Drupal is certainly ahead of other CMSes.
— Jesse: How could we achieve that?
— person: You need auditors to do that, and that costs typically USD $400 per page.
— [… a bunch I didn’t get …]
(response to how do we get people to do testing)
I’m working on a distribution at a university. Currently creating a training guide, and a training guide could be precisely what is useful for ensuring that accessibility is good: can people with different disabilities also accomplish these tasks?