Working Towards AA - Making Drupal More Accessible

Proposal No: 931

Bios & Handouts

Speaker(s)

• Mike Gifford, President, OpenConcept Consulting Inc.

Disability Area: Cognitive|Learning   Mobility   Vision   Deaf|HOH   Other Disability  

Topic Area: Legal   Best Practices   Web|Media Access   Alternate Format   Campus Policy   Curriculum Access   Assistive Technology   Information Resources  

Summary of Session

Learn about Drupal 7's accessibility enhancements and how the community organized to make it happen. Drupal can now be installed, administered & edited by blind users. Find out how your CMS can benefit from our work.

Abstract

Drupal is a popular Content Management System (CMS) that also runs many sites in the accessibility community. Drupal 7 has seen a great many accessibility improvements over the last four years. As a Drupal Core Accessibility Maintainer I know what issues we've fixed, what issues are outstanding, but also know that there are a lot of issues which we still don't know anything about. The presentation will touch on improvements made in Drupal 7 Core and the transparent process we used. We will touch on enhancements to API's that have improved the accessibility of all contributed Drupal 7 modules & themes. The focus will be on the community process of engaging with community and continually improving the software that it produces. I hope to also illustrate how the effective use of a CMS can make it easier to have consistently accessible sites.

Kepoints

1. Why people are talking about Drupal's accessibility and how it is different than other CMS's
2. How open source plays a role in addressing accessibility problems on the Internet
3. How a small group of people accomplished such great improvements in Drupal's accessibility

Speaker Bio(s)

Mike Gifford

Mike Gifford is the founder and president of OpenConcept Consulting Inc.. Since then he has been active in developing and enhancing open source content management systems to facilitate client control over their content. Passionate about building communities of collaboration, Mike and his team at OpenConcept have worked with several national government & non-government organizations. Although having spearheaded the accessibility enhancements in Drupal over the last four years, Mike is now officially a Drupal 8 Core Accessibility Maintainer. Knowing the importance of accessibility to government agencies, OpenConcept has always worked to contribute new resources and build upon the best practices of others - collaboration is an essential element to the sustainability of the open source community and is fundamental to the work of Mike and his team.

Handout(s)