By Sengoku on

Hello. I work with the California Department of Education.

My particular role has me testing a great deal of websites and software for the disabled community. Of particular interest to me is web accessibility for the blind. I do much of my testing with my monitor turned off, for example.

I’ve been looking at CMSes recently. A cursory search here showed me a page talking about how certain “themes” claimed to be 508 compliant, but not enough information for my needs. It’s still better than most projects, many of which have no concept of the topic at all.

Government agencies are supposed to meet ADA 508 specifications, although adoption has been slow. A solution that does this well will have an advantage should enforcement tightens up on this issue. There’s the bonus of advancing the ball in education and disability issues as well.

Can anyone point me to existing, live projects that use the accessibility features? Preferably stock. I’d like to see what the tech can do, so I can do a manual examination. Bobby and similar automated tools are helpful, but have huge blind spots. No pun intended.

My level of current Drupal knowledge, is that it exists, is open source, uses PHP, and has a sizable, friendly support community. I know nothing about modules, themes and configuration.

Comments

ebw’s picture

ebw commented

When I came across "source ordered CSS layout" in the catalog of ships (themes) I thought about non-visual and non-graphic presentation, so I squirreled away a copy. I haven't had the time to work with it, as I'm wicked behind on real work (drupal is an expensive hobby).

I'm sure you already know about color issues.

As I've two autistic children, fine motor is another access issue, not specific to this cms.

Good luck with the CA DoE. I hope to be teaching secondary schools math this time next year.

signature left on blank check, reward if found

robert castelo’s picture

robert castelo commented

Hi, very interesting post.

If you're volunteering to do accessibility testing for Drupal, we could provide you with a stock installation of the latest version (Drupal 5) if you like.

Contact me if you're interested, by clicking on my name, then use the 'Contact' tab of my account.

By the way, Drupal has an accessibility working group which you're welcome to join:

http://groups.drupal.org/accessibility

Last year Jeffrey Zeldman praised Drupal for making an effort to be accessible and standards compliant, there's always ways we can improve though:
http://www.cortextcommunications.com/node/553

Cortext Communications
Drupal Themes & Modules

------------------------------------------
Drupal Specialists: Consulting, Development & Training

Robert Castelo, CTO
Code Positive
London, United Kingdom
----

doka’s picture

doka commented

There is a pretty good series at IBM to show how to work with Drupal. In article #7 there is a chapter about accessibility: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/i-osource7/

Doka

Doka

Chill35’s picture

Chill35 commented

The text in Drupal 5 Garland's theme (the default theme that ships with Drupal 5 RC 1) is not resizable in Internet Explorer, because it uses as base text specifications (in the CSS) pixel measurements, instead of %, em or keywords. (Text should be set in pixels only when resizing it in the browser breaks the layout.)

Chill35’s picture

Chill35 commented

In other words, if you're not completely blind, but have a visual impairment and want to resize the text, don't use Drupal 5 with Garland with Internet Explorer.

misty3’s picture

misty3 commented

Thats right but Garland being fluid ,probably text sizes can be changed to %
rather then px or em.

The other point is that, for this type of accessibility issues, Opera eg Opera 9
is a very good choice as it can increase any text or pix to 1000% more with
reasonably good quality by just clicking on the lens on the top right corner.

Chill35’s picture

Chill35 commented

Garland being fluid, text size should be changed to % or em or keyword, rather than px.

It's a recorded bug, but it does not look like Drupal developers want to fix it.

Thanks for the Opera tip. Unfortunately Opera is not very used.

:)

Caroline

Marbux’s picture

Marbux commented

Also note that using pixel settings makes a page next to impossible to browse using a mobile device, e.g., a PDA or cellphone. So using pixel settings blocks far more than just those with visual handicaps.

swimswimswim’s picture

swimswimswim commented

I too am interested in

live projects that use the accessibility features? Preferably stock.

mgifford’s picture

mgifford
he/him
Primary language English
commented

Robert Castelo site is down but he was linking to this page of Zeldman's blog.

I've done some work evaluating the accessibility of Drupal 6 themes.

I'm most interested in knowing though if there has been any progress implementing Drupal within the California Department of Education. Seems with all of the DrupalEd threads going on that there must have been at least a few prototypes developed over the last two years.

Mike

--EDIT--

More information is available from - http://drupal.org/node/394094
--
OpenConcept | Government

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

There is the Accessible Content module, which is a start... the module is still in dev, but it can check both content and the theme (using accessible_content_themer - included with the module). We use it in our Cal State campus: