Posted by jessebeach on July 20, 2013 at 9:38pm
Accessibility recap
Behavioral tests
I'm trying to get open links to the raw footage. I contacted dcmistry about this.
Our takeaways are that:
- Drupal is not as accessible as we even dared to hope.
- Content creation is painful and at points impossible for a non-sighted user.
- The overlay is unusable for a non-sighted person. It's really painful to watch someone get lost in it.
Accessibility in 8 session
Take home points.
- Accessibility is more than non-visual interfaces. Users interface with systems through a variety of mechanisms such as puff/suck machines.
- Some screen reader users find the hierarchical page navigation (drilling in and out of landmark regions like navigation) confusing, because they need to keep a map in their minds of how far they've drilled down into a page. This is kind of pogo-sticking with an aural interface.
Sprints
Issues addressed with a patch
- https://drupal.org/node/2047175 : Make the status message field discoverable by assistive technology agents; alert AT agent users to error messages
- https://drupal.org/node/2047061 : Remove redundant [role=navigation] in the header around the breadcrumbs in the Seven theme page template
- https://drupal.org/node/2044521 : Label used for markup, not associated with input form
- https://drupal.org/node/2045151 : width:1px in visually-hidden class causing problems for screen readers in Firefox
- https://drupal.org/node/2044511 : Label missing in Page: The title of this view & The menu path or URL of this view
- https://drupal.org/node/2044523 : Page: Theming missing Label
- https://drupal.org/node/2044505 : Remove empty headers in Views UI
- https://drupal.org/node/742344 : Allow forms to set custom validation error messages on required fields
Issues worked on
- https://drupal.org/node/2047075 : Mark invalid form field with [aria-invalid=true]
If you have more information about these events, please add color in the comments
Comments
Great stuff
Based on what @jessebeach and @jenlampton reported from the testing sessions, we have some serious work to do. Despite so much effort in recent years to make Drupal more accessible, we have a long way to go. We need to be more systematic about testing, about meeting the standards, about implementing consistently.
For example, we use some ARIA landmarks in the Drupal UI, but not consistently from place to place. Having inconsistent, confusing use of landmarks is worse than if we had no landmarks at all.
The Overlay is also a significant barrier. It's time to re-consider having overlay start out disabled by default.
In the tools arena, @jessebeach shared some new information about the new Drupal.announce() API and new Backbone framework. She also reported about all the good work @kevee is doing on the Accessibility Module and automated accessibility testing tools. It's a great vision for us to have these automated tools become part of the patch process and part of the Drupal content creation experience.
It's great to see so many people passionately working on this. And even though it's hard to watch users struggle to use Drupal, it's really valuable to know what their experience is. Let's take our new wide-eyed awareness of the problems and turn them into solutions together!
www.pixotech.com
Some of the links to issues
Some of the links to issues listed above take to a pagenot found, there is a colon added to the "a href".
Shyamala
Unimity Solutions
@Jessebeach, you
@Jessebeach, you wrote:
Content creation is painful and at points impossible for a non-sighted user.
Can you elaborate a little more on that? What are the "specific" issues found out during the behavioral testing? Which environment was used for testing (I mean operating system and screen reader)?
I've always said that I dislike the overlay because it is not accessible. I always turn it off. And, from what I understood during sprints at Drupalcon Portland, a lot of developers do the same. Time for an issue to turn it off by default? ;)
@falcon03 There's already an
@falcon03
There's already an issue up about this:
I even posted a comment about the a11y issues, but since I'm not a full-on screen reader user, would be interesting to hear your experiences with the overlay itself. (I use magnifier mainly, but use screen readers for long periods of reading, as a note, I'm a Mac user).
Disable overlay in standard profile
https://drupal.org/node/2004836