Drupal 7's integrated Fields API (formerly CCK) is a great step forward in allowing us to quickly create robust content types that integrate much better core. With the included Fieldgroup module, we can group fields into logical sections:
This is great for creating a single logical group containing multiple fields. We can set the number of values allowed for each field which exposes the 'Add another item' button, but what if we want to instead set the number of...
Relations is an awesome new module for Drupal 7. It essentially allows you to link any entities together and which are themselves fieldable. I can think of limitless ways in which this can be super useful. However, the topic of this blog posting is not to heap praise on relations and explain in detail what they can be used for; I'll let you discover that yourselves. The intention is rather to give a practical example of how to create views of separate entity types tied...
Really like this article: An In Depth Analysis of HTML5 Multimedia and Accessibility.
Last May I gave a talk at Guelph's 2011 Accessibility Conference. I wanted to raise awareness about aspects of the Drupal 7 accessibility improvements could be used as an example. The video was recorded by the University & I was sent a copy of it so that I could upload it here. I do think that the university may also upload a copy at some point, but there were delays and I had ideas within the...
I was pointed to this great resource on Plains Cree (nêhiyawêwin) links but it still doesn't have much information about presenting this language on the web.
Since hearing the story about the creation of Cree & Inuit syllabics, I've been interested in how colonization introduced written language to an oral culture. Since working on several Arabic/Hebrew/Farsi sites over the years, I've been curious as to how this applies to the web. Being a unilingual person, I can't do more than...
OpenConcept has been participating working in the work of building a Drupal theme for the Treasury Board Secretariat's Common Look & Feel (CLF) for a number of years now. We started distributing one in 2008 based on the Zen theme & Drupal 6. It was pretty simple and relied on a great many modules to be downloaded & configured before it would work as expected. We didn't get many contributions to improve the theme after providing it to a number of departments we and releasing it...
Recently as we've been working on enhancements to Drupal 8, we run into several situations where we are looking at the jQuery library. Drupal's been including the free software jQuery for the last two releases and are using it more and more as it evolves. We were hoping we'd be able to simply leverage a solid accessible jQuery UI element rather than have to continue to enhance our own javascript widgets.
jQuery UI 1.8 has an autocomplete widget in it so why don't we just use this...
Last year I was approached by Jennison Asuncion who has been instigating a number of innovative grassroots efforts to get people talking about accessibility issues. I was impressed by the successes in DC, London, Montreal and Boston and it seemed like a nice challenge to take on in Canada's capital. These cities all organized a second conference this year and now Toronto joined in as well.
The plan was to initially have the unconference in the spring of 2011, but unfortunately there...
In case you haven't noticed, the OpenConcept website has had an overhaul as of late. In migrating to Drupal 7, we not only were looking to migrate from our outdated Drupal 5 website but were excited for the opportunity to design an entirely new theme. OpenConcept partnered with Rachela Brisindi, from RGB Creative (http://www.rgb-creative.com/) in order to update our logo and website design. Although Rachela was more experienced in print design, she had a strong creative vision and was...
At CSUN15, Anne Comfort of Mount Allison University presented an interesting study - Can a font improve reading? - of over 200 full time students with dyslexia. In this study they were not able to demonstrate that changing the font helps readability for this population. There's a great summary of this in Adrian Roselli blog post after CSUN.
It's important to note that there is considerable controversy around whether or not fonts can provide any benefit for people with...
Wanted to point folks to Karl Groves' article Do Accessibility Testing First, I really like his idea of automated nightly testing for accessibility. I also wanted to acknowledge that this is more of an accessibility evaluation tactic than methodology.
I just got word that the Web Accessibility Initiative's is starting up a WCAG 2.0 Evaluation Methodology Task Force to provide more comprehensive guidance on evaluating web accessibility. This is great, not only because the Web Content...
