accessibility

Accessibility tag: #DAX or similar?

Wording of accessibility tag: “I pledge to make [this module or theme] as accessible as it can be.” With a link to a drupal.org page on accessibility.

What the pledge means: The developer commits to evaluating their module or theme; fixing critical issues found during evaluation; adding accessibility improvements into future development; and responding to accessibility issues if they are filed. The developer should consider the user experience of administrators, content creators, and site visitors.

Between 12 and 16 percent of all adults (in America and Canada) are not blind but have difficulty seeing small objects especailly type. They are the readers of the large type book editions. The great majority of the people who have visual accessiblity problems with computers are NOT blind. The majority simply have what the medical profession describes as "low vision" or "limited vision." This is typically the situation where the individual has sight, but cannot discern small details or discriminate between letters of small fonts.

while i am biased towards early ARIA adaptation, having worked on the ARIA spec for longer than i'd care to remember, i would counsel both early adaptation AND redundancy for graceful degredation, for, as everett has consitently and correctly pointed out, implementation of ARIA is incomplete and inconsistent...

I was overwhelmed by the amazing support that accessibility is receiving from the Drupal community, we really do rock! We had an excellent presentation at Drupalcon last week by Kate Lynch, and a couple of very productive BoF sessions. In the second session we started to put together some ideas for how we can move forward to ensure that Drupal 8 is a completely accessible CMS, including communicating an accessibility statement, and making sure as many Drupal modules and themes as possible are accessible.

I am working on developing an accessibility checking module. Mostly this effort is to learn more about module development, but I am hoping that te module is helpful to others. The overview is that the module will provide a block with a list of links to good online accessibility testing sites. When a user clicks a link from any page on the site it will take them to the web-site of the testing tool they have selected.

After quick introductions, we chose 3 topics to focus on: first, the Accessibility Pledge idea; second, Drupal 8 planning; and third, the Accessibility Statement. Many of these ideas were discussed earlier, including at Accessibility BoF #1.

After discussing the d7ux overlay accessibility issue with several at Drupalcon, and mentioning the issue in my lightning talk at the Core Developer Summit I noticed that an Allow users to opt-out of the overlay issue had been opened in the bug tracker. Overlay is a contentious topic for some in our community, and I will not rehash all of the pros and cons for Overlay's inclusion in core. I will however attempt to concisely present an argument for Overlay being disabled in all Drupal 7 core installation profiles.

At today's BOF on accessibility, we were discussing a need for caption support for various media modules. I filed an issue here: http://drupal.org/node/775632 for media module, but it would be great to have a discussion on where we should focus on adding caption support, especially getting some use cases up would be great.

Updated the subject line to focus this discussion around accessibility with media modules in general.

Overview: I propose to increase the accessibility of important Drupal interfaces for people with various impairments. Specifically, I want to modify Drupal 7's core themes, the WYSIWYG module's TinyMCE configuration options, and View's interface and output to be more accessible.

For Drupal 8, one of the key areas that needs improvement is FAPI. This will also take significant coordination and good up-front design before we dive in coding.

Here's a PDF of the presentation I submitted for the Core Developer Summit about D8 Form API accessibility:
http://www.ojctech.com/sites/default/files/d8-fapi-a11y.pdf

Here is a more accessible HTML version of the same basic content:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/56703#comment-170798

I'd appreciate any feedback and suggestions.