Making the CMS Made Simple Admin Panel more accessible

[westis]

The Development Team is working with making the CMS Made Simple Admin Panel (as well as the core package) more accessible. Samuel (SjG) is the guy in charge. And you can contribute to this process!

What needs to be done for the admin panel to conform to accessability standards, such as the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative?

Post your suggestions and patches here and we can add them to the core. Thanks!

[gigicop]

Hi,
first of all  I must say that I'm still using CMSMS 0.10 Antigua and that I'll probably upgrade to 0.11.2 soon. Therefore I don't know if what I'm going to write has already been implemented in current version.
I'm blind and I use Jaws 5.10 with Eloquence as a screen reader.
Here are my suggestions:
1 - an accessible editor
TinyMCE is not accessible. An editor like this one of the forum could be already better, although it's not the best.
2 - AccessKey
When adding a new content (a page, a link etc) it would be useful to add an access key to the item in the menu. Access keys can be useful in the admin page, too. For a blind webmaster it would be very easy to select a link like "Main" or "Log Off" by pressing alt+m or alt+l.
3 - A link to skip the menu
This is very helpful, both for guests and admin,  to move quickly to the main content of the page.
4 - Headings
Headings (H1, H2, H3 etc) are very helpful when you need to move from a content to another in the web page.

This is all for the moment... I hope that my english is not too bad to be understood, and please forgive me if these things already exist in 0.11.2 or 0.12..
Anyway, thanks for your work. CMSMS is already a good cms as regards accessability as it can be easily customized with templates.
Bye.

Gigi

[gigicop]

Hi and thanks for your input

Hi Patricia and thank you for your reply!

1. now the default editor is FCKEditor, i'm not sure it's more accessible, but indeed has been modified to at least insert a alt="" when no name specified for an image (instead of no alt or image filename). Some ease of use in that editor for sure.

I hope I'll have time to test it soon. The main problem that I have with TinyMCE is that I cannot select the text to modify or to delete. When in an edit field, I press control+shift+arrows to select a word or shift+arrows to select a character, but it seems it doesn't work with that editor. In fact, my screen reader "says" that no text has been selected.
Another problem is that I cannot understand where an image is in the text. Therefore, if I need to delete or change the image, I need sighted help. I hope that FCKEditor is more friendly.

2. this is done in 0.12

3. this is added in 0.12 sample pages: a link to navigation, and link to main content

Very good!

4. where you want more oth them? in admin, or example frontend templates?

In my opinion headings are always useful to understand a bit more the structure of the page and to move quickly to the heading the blind guest is interested in. When the browser loads a page, it "says" how many links and headings it contains. This can help to understand how many sections of contents there are in the page (main menu, main content, sub menu, other contents etc...). With Jaws for Windows I press "H" to move through headings. Every time I press "H" the screen reader reads the text between H... and /h... If I already know the level of the heading that I need I can press "1" to move to "H1", "2" to move to "H2" and so on... Other screen readers have other commands but they work more or less the same way.
That's why, in my opinion, both the admin and the guests can benefit from headings.

cheers

Good bye and thanks again.

[jelle]

why do you wish to use a javascript editor at all? Wouldn't a textarea give you lot less headaches?

My impression is that all these wysiwyg editors use pictures mostly to reassure the user and shield him somewhat of the html. If you are blind the pretty pictures won't work, and I doubt the shielding from the html is much use either. Or is editing html (or any other code) too hard with a screenreader? must be a strange experience for a sighted person...

[Maverick]

What needs to be done for the admin panel to conform to accessability standards?

What I like to suggest for the Admin panel is to have Question mark icons on each page where you can click on.
If you click on it you get either redirected to the designated page from the documentation or you get a short explanation of the fields of that page with a link to the documentation.

I'm quite new to cmsms so feel free to correct me if such a similar thing already exists.

[nils73]

Most of the suggestions here are right when it comes to ATAG conformance:

1. Providing a context-sensitive help
2. Having structured markup and no layout-tables
  (this includes h1 to h6 as well as forms and labels and many other things)
3. Everything the user can see should be configurable (CMSMS does that already)
4. Alternative means to edit a page (WYSIWYG, Textile, HTML, etc. which CMSMS already has)
5. Keyboard / Accesskey support
6. Support editors to create accessible websites (ABBR, ACRONYM database for example or the ability to change the language)
7. Search feature in admin-mode
8. Consistency (which isn't given yet when I think of where modules might appear)

These are only a few checkpoints, but there is a checklist for ATAG 1.0 and one checklist for ATAG 2.0 out there that might help.

Regards,
Nils

[Elijah Lofgren]

What needs to be done for the admin panel to conform to accessability standards?

What I like to suggest for the Admin panel is to have Question mark icons on each page where you can click on.
If you click on it you get either redirected to the designated page from the documentation or you get a short explanation of the fields of that page with a link to the documentation.

I'm quite new to cmsms so feel free to correct me if such a similar thing already exists.

Help links to the documentation wiki have been added to each section of the Admin Panel in CMSMS 1.0-svn 

[nils73]

Help links to the documentation wiki have been added to each section of the Admin Panel in CMSMS 1.0-svn 

Yep ... great work, guys. Now we need to fill the Wiki.

Regards,
Nils

[nils73]

Serialthunder,

I use CMSMS because of the valid output it generates, even if you use FCKEditor which I prefer over TinyMCE. You could also use Markdown or Textile instead of any WYSIWYG-editor which would facilitate the process of editing website content for handicapped people.

You do not really have to worry about blind or visually impaired people: The backend of CMSMS is almost tableless (regarding layout-tables) and can easily be themed. Each user can choose the theme that suits his needs best. However there are still some glitches that we are aware of:

- missing labels with form-fields
- missing contextual help in many cases
- still some layout tables (especially in some modules)
- with 1.0 some AJAX-features (some with fallback)
- JavaScript features without fallback (deleting pages: you will not be warned)

I have installed CMSMS on several projects and in one case we have handicapped users on the admin-panel. After one year of CMSMS they are still very satisfied with the whole CMS and the output it generates. However, teaching them how to do things right was one of the main tasks we had to accomplish.

Regards,
Nils