Austin Drupal Users June Meetup

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KerryLarose's picture
Posted by KerryLarose on June 7, 2010 at 8:00pm
Start: 
2010-06-16 07:15 - 08:30 UTC
Organizers: 
KerryLarose
Event type: 
User group meeting

http://www.meetup.com/The-Austin-Drupal-Meetup-Group/calendar/13638792/?...

At our last meetup, Erik Summerfield of http://www.phase2tech... gave a presentation on Section Fronts and Views. Originally scheduled to be a a brief technical presentation to complement the scheduled Color Pairings and Contrasts, this was expanded into a full-length presentation that also included some panels discussion and demos.

We have rescheduled Cliff Tylick's Color Pairings and Contrasts presentation to this month's meetup. Many people expressed interest in hearing more from Cliff Tylick on Color Pairings and Contrasts, so we're going to be giving him the mic and sitting back for a longer presentation on general color and design principles, best practices, and compliance that every developer and designer should be aware of.

In addition, we are looking to have a short presentation on Hosting in the Cloud (with persistent data). Drupal cloud hosting is seeing rapid adoption among users and with all the current interest it should be the perfect topic for a shorter talk. We encourage people to share their own experiences with Drupal Cloud hosting as part of the Q&A following this presentation.

We will once again be combining Drupal with a dinner venue at Mangia Pizza at Spicewood Springs and Mesa (8012 Mesa Drive, Austin, TX‎). Parking should be easier than ever, and we have reserved space from 6:30-9 to meet, eat, talk Drupal, and plan for the months ahead.

We encourage everyone to come out and have some pizza, throw back a drink or two, and talk Drupal with us.

Presentation starts at approximately 7:15. Room reservations from 6:30 - 9:00.

We are still looking for speakers for the next several meetups! Our meetups are on the 3rd Wednesday of the month. Presentations can be from 5-45 minutes long and cover a wide range of topics -we'd love to get a technical presentation and/or a theming-focused presentation of medium length (30 or so minutes) set up for the near future.

Please contact me with your availability or to make suggestions!

Comments

As promised, a few links from the June meetup

Posted by Cliff on June 17, 2010 at 1:22pm
Cliff's picture

Choosing a Color Palette and Adjusting Its Contrast

I mentioned these links in my talk, "Designers Eye for the Geeky Guy":

  • Pictaculous goes to Colour Lovers and Adobe's Kuler to extract ideas for palettes from an image of your choice. (The idea, as you might recall, was to have your customer give you a photo that captures the spirit of their site. Then you use this tool to extract a palette or two. You can be confident that your customer will be comfortable with the results because, after all, they basically picked the palette themselves.)
  • The Colour Contrast Analyser is one tool you can use to determine whether a pair of colors has sufficient contrast according to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0).
  • If you need to lighten or darken one color to get enough contrast, the HTML Color Picker is one tool that lets you do that quickly and easily.
  • Another tool for finding better contrast is available online. Contrast-A (Web) shows you the range of accessible options for a color pair and lets you adjust one of those colors to improve contrast. It also allows you to save a set of color "chips" as a way to show your palette and document the accessibility of the color pairs chosen. I forgot to mention last night that it also lets you save this palette as a PDF, so it's easy to share the information you develop with others who need to see it — for example, a designer or customer a thousand miles away. And for those times you can't get on the Internet, get the standalone version of Contrast-A.

A little color theory

If you want to learn more about color theory, a great short presentation is Color Theory, the Color Wheel, and Color Schemes. If you do follow this link, let me know if I was getting any of the concepts presented here wrong.

Tools for assessing other aspects of accessibility

Color contrast is only a small part of making sure your site is accessible. Although there is no way any tool can analyze your site and tell you whether it is completely accessible, there are a few tools that will not only do a reasonable analysis of everything that can be assessed by an algorithm but also help you make sure that you do review all the factors that only a human can judge. (As we discussed last night, using Drupal properly is a good way to ensure that you build many of these features into your site without even thinking about them.)

These tools are particularly useful for assessing all aspects accessibility that can't be assessed by our color contrast tools above:

  • With the WAVE online evaluation tool, you can either enter the url of the page you want analyzed or, if the page is behind a firewall, upload its html. WAVE will produce a report that identifies any issues you either missed or need to check on your own.
  • There is also a WAVE toolbar, which you can add to your Web browser and use to quickly run portions of the report on any html file, online or off, that your browser can display.
  • A similar tool, the Web developer extension is available for Firefox and for Chrome. This tool is a browser extension, so it creates a new menu tab in your browser with essentially the same functions available in WAVE.

There are others, but that's a good short list. If there is interest, as a future topic I would be happy to demonstrate how to use one or more of these tools to assess the accessibility of any website. If we do that one, bring your laptops with the tools loaded in advance. I can open a tab in each site the group wants to review and you can follow along as I demonstrate.

Also, the Drupal Accessibility Group is working to create a lot of helpful information on coding an accessible site and assessing the accessibility of your site. When it's ready for prime time, we will load it to drupal.org/accessibility. Nothing's there yet —that's why I'm not linking to it — but we're not all that far away.