Long Live the Web Experience Toolkit

In December 2008, OpenConcept set up a Drupal site to demonstrate that we could meet the requirements of the Treasury Board Secretariat's Common Look & Feel (CLF) 2.0 . We went further than this by releasing the code first to people within the Government of Canada & second we made it available through Intellectual Resources Canada (IRCan)'s repository. We provided a demonstration site to dispel Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt about open source & government, but also to engage with the government community to extend & improve this theme. After two and a half years of voluntary effort, we've decided to...

The Challenge of Collaborative Editing in Government

I've actively encouraged NGOs to use Google Docs for real-time collaborative editing. They have a really great suite of tools which really should make emailing Word Documents between editors a thing of the past. There have been a limited number of tools that allowed for this type of process, however we've been experimenting with a great open source tool called Etherpad which will make this process much more common, especially within government agencies. We've been using this interface at iEtherpad now and have been quite impressed by it's ease of use. It's simpler than Google Docs, but has a few...

Recent Videos From DrupalCon About Accessibility

Here's a summary of accessibility presentations from DrupalCon San Francisco & Chicago. I've put them in an order that I hope will allow people who know nothing about web accessibility to progress through a rather complex subject. All DrupalCon videos are stored on Archive.org which now also has an option for using HTML5 video. This is my first time using this great new HTML5 tag to embed a video. It's also a great space to highlight that there are as yet no captions available for these videos & I've yet to figure out how to make the controls accessible to...

Drupal 7

There is just so much to say about Drupal 7 and advantages to upgrading. There is so much excitement around this new platform and I'm very happy that we've been able to play a small part in getting this application to where it is now. I've already talked at length about accessibility issues with this release, but it's time to focus a bit more on some of the other great aspects. Usability There's been so much work that has gone into usability. There are two new themes which have been added, Bartik and Seven. Bartik provides a fresh new public...

Together At Last: HTML5 & Drupal

OpenConcept Consulting takes a step into the future of the web with HTML5. Witness the power of lightning fast and super stable in-page video with the stunning effects of jQuery. Accessible, mobile friendly, sleek and flexible: HTML5 is where our heart is. We are early adopters of many new technologies so that we can test/evaluate them before implementing them for our clients. We pushed forward with an early Drupal 7 install so that we could dedicate some time to working out the remaining kinks that are holding back implementation of this great new version. We've been using social media to...

DrupalCon Chicago and Accessibility

I don't know where the time's gone, but next week at this time I'm going to be at DrupalCon with thousands of other users & developers. I've really enjoyed Boston, DC & San Francisco, and expect that Chicago will be just as exciting. It's interesting to reflect that it was in 2008 at the Boston Keynote that Dries set the course for Drupal 7 challenged the community to embrace RDFa. This was long before we became involved in making Drupal 7 more accessible, but making sites more machine readable will do a lot to making them more accessible to people...

Gitting Earth Hour & Drupal

We've used CVS, SVN over the years and are now using Git . If you've not a programmer you probably wouldn't be familiar with tools like Concurrent Versions System or Subversion which allow for precise sharing & collaboration between thousands of people but with over 150,000 lines of code in Drupal Core , you really need to have a way to manage these details to ensure that you've got the highest quality control possible. Git is the latest in social coding and because if it's distributed framework it should allow many more people to evaluate, experiment & collaborate with the...

Why We Aren't Supporting IE6

We've made a team decision to proactively advocate for people to upgrade from IE6 to a more modern web browser. We're doing this primarily because it has given designers & developers such grief, but also because we want our users to have the best, most secure browsing experience they can. Given the huge problems in IE6 we wanted to give our visitors as many tools as we can provide to help you upgrade to a better browser. Now we know that most of the remaining IE6 users are within large bureaucracies that have IT staff who believe that the cost...

Accessibility Issues Are Inevitable, So Let's Get On With It!

Back in November of 2010 Federal Court Justice Michael Kelen gave the Treasury Board of the Government of Canada (GoC) 15 months to make all of it's websites accessible to the blind. This is still a landmark case even though the government decided to appeal the case on Jan 10th. I'm not sure how much longer the appeal will extend the case, but the writing is on the wall, the GoC is going to need to begin the long and difficult process of ensuring that it's millions of public web pages are accessible to all Canadians . It is unclear...

Launching Early with Drupal 7

We've been very busy working on Drupal 7 enhancements for the last two years. It's gotten really hectic around our office in the last few months so we're not able to devote the time we wanted to launch a flashy new design. We've got a new design in the works to replace the one we set up back in early 2007 when Drupal 5 came out, but we've been prioritizing our efforts on getting to our clients sites rather than finishing up ours. Given that we're not going to be able to launch the new design in January, I've decided...