Tools, techniques, & resources

Last updated on
23 April 2023

Drupal 7 will no longer be supported after January 5, 2025. Learn more and find resources for Drupal 7 sites

Please note that this was the Drupal 7 best practice. For current best practices see the Accessibility Handbook.

First, consider reading the Drupal Accessibility Statement.

Next, here are some things you can do to make your Drupal site more accessible:

Drupal accessibility resources

External accessibility resources

Accessibility in Drupal 7

There are a number of changes in Drupal 7 core that will greatly assist with accessibility.

Drupal 7 will see improvement in the Forms API (FAPI) but will also come with a standardized way to make descriptive text visible to screen readers and invisible to sighted people.

To implement this in your templates, you can just wrap elements with the CSS class="element-invisible".

To implement within a module, you can use this code snippet:


<?php l(t('Read more...<span class="element-invisible"> about %title</span>', array('%title' => $node->title)), 'node/' . $node->nid, array('html' => TRUE)); ?> 

An alternative implementation is as follows:


<?php $link['title'] = '<span class="icon"></span>' . $item['link']['title']; $link['attributes'] = array('id' => 'toolbar-link-' . $id, 'class' => array('to-overlay')); if (!empty($item['link']['description'])) { $link['title'] .='<span class="element-invisible">' . $item['link']['description'] . '</span>'; $link['attributes']['title'] = $item['link']['description']; } ?> 

Accessibility in HTML, digital media, & JavaScript

Accessibility standards

Tools for evaluating accessibility

Programming tools for accessibility

Keyboard-only navigation

Disabling your mouse and navigating a site with your keyboard can be a very humbling experience. Generally, this isn't enabled by default, but, in advanced preferences, you can enable keyboard-only navigation. There are articles on how to do this on Macintosh and specific instructions for Chrome, Firefox, Opera and IE8. A table of other keyboard shortcuts is available from WikiPedia

Screen readers

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