I took a great opportunity to go to Guelph to both participate in and present to the 2011 Accessibility Conference. I was able to meet with a number of great accessibility professionals from Southern Ontario who were gathered for this event at the University of Guelph. I missed the A11yCamp which Sean Yo organized and also to Derek Featherstone's HTML5/CSS3 training, but sent two of my team to it.
In thinking about what to present to this audience I had rethink a few things. In...
I got talking with Sandi Wassmer from Copious about accessibility best practices after I posted Accessibility Tips for Management last month. We had a really good exchange over Skype & have continued talking over Twitter. It's really great to hear what is happening outside of North America. Since we've been talking she was published in .NET Magazine with a great article The 10 principles of inclusive web design which I think are good guidelines for thinking about designing a site. ...
I was happy to see the AODA Compliance Wizard produced to make it a bit easier to determine when/where Ontario organizations need to act about accessibility issues.
The Accessibility Standard for Information and Communications for the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) was released earlier today and it's a great accomplishment that reflects the dedication of thousands of people who have worked for improved Human Rights for our fellow citizens. It is great to see...
Like many government agencies, the Government of Canada has a mandate to address accessibility issues. The Common Look & Feel presently is based on the 1999 accessibility standard WCAG 1.0 and will shortly require WCAG 2.0 compliance. This falls within the Management Accountability Framework, which is an incentive based system for management. Internal audits are presently being used to evaluate accessibility improvements over time.
As I noted in my last blog Accessibility Tips...
Most accessibility articles are written for either developers or designers who need guidance on how to implement accessibility fixes. There's a lot more to write on this subject, but I was looking for articles written for the communications professionals who are overseeing web project. In most large organizations the people directing the sites development are not the same people as those who are coding it.
Without having specialized technical knowledge tied to accessibility, do...
The quick summary is that it's not ready yet, but it's looking very exciting! To get an update on the status of geospacial modules the following wiki is key. Unfortunately, of the 20 or so geo modules, only 6 have a Drupal 7 release at this point (only two of which are alpha releases & the rest are development releases).
GMap includes location, taxonomy & macro utilities and of the 27,000 sites using this module there are 1000 that are presently using the Drupal 7 development...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...
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...
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...
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.
UsabilityThere's been so much work that has gone into usability. There are two new themes which have been...
