Brainstorming for an accessibility proposal

@brandonojc

Glad to see that there is support for the WYSIWYG idea, which could be the greatest improvement in accessibility that could be contributed. A few questions on the editor you have mentioned, just to get the conversation going.

1. Do you know under which license the editor is offered?

Ideally the editor would be offered under GPL, however as far as I understand as long as the license would allow us to make a derivative product then we can use it in drupal, as only the module (bridge between Drupal and editor) would need to be GPL.

1. Do you think that it is better to bring a new editor to Drupal, or to try to work with one of the popular editors?

I think that if we can decide upon an editor that is commonly used, and if the organization responsible for the editor is open to the idea it would be best to work on improving the accessibility of that editor. However, in practicality, it would be easier to ensure that a useful product is actually produced if we do not have to pass patches through a separate development team.

1. If bringing a new editor to Drupal do you think that it easier to start with something where the code would need to be ported, or to start the design from scratch using the concepts in other editors as a starting point?

Having not tried the editor you mentioned I think that it is great that it already exists and this project would be to port and improve on the code. The downside of this obviously is that the student will need to have skills in both dotNet and php.

Interested in hearing your, or anyone else's thoughts on these questions.

Thanks,
Everett
http://zufelt.ca

An online authoring tool that offers formatted as well as HTML level editing would be a huge difference to some of the W3C contributors who are also screen reader users. Some of the offline tools that can be used successfully could be models.

I'm personally unclear how the traditional WYSIWYG practice of selecting text from within the text box to apply formatting to via a widget can be made accessible.

I'm looking around for ideas for a proposal, and helping make Drupal more accessible seems important. But, I admit that I'm not too familiar with accessibility right now. I tried browsing the web with the Orca screen reader and Firefox, and I can definitely see how the use ARIA Landmarks could improve the browsing experience. Most sites have a lot of stuff on the top of their pages before their content, all of which will be read by the screen reader. But, ARIA Landmarks would enable users to easily skip to different sections of the page.

I also tried to install that OneNet CMS to check out the editor, but I wasn't able to get it running correctly (I kept getting all kinds of errors). However, it looks like you can make TinyMCE fairly compliant to a draft of ATAG 2.0 by just modifying the settings and using the achecker plugin (I can't provide links without setting off the spam filter, so do a google search for "TinyMCE:Accessibility" and check out the first 2 results). Seeing that the WYSIWYG module seems to be the editor API of choice now, implementing an accessible TinyMCE would only involve adding something like "accessibility" and "achecker" check-boxes to WYSIWYG's TinyMCE settings.

Adding support for ARIA landmarks and an accessible TinyMCE should not take very long, so I will need some more tasks for my proposal. I'm not yet familiar with these accessibility specifications, so I'll have to read up on them some to figure out what would be involved in the other tasks like making Views ATAG compliant, and modifying the core themes to be WCAG compliant.

Anyone want to offer me suggestions, insights, or be a mentor?

Also, is Drupal 7 in code-freeze? I.E. Would they commit patches to core themes after SOC ends, or would I contribute accessible versions of the core themes?