CMS Made Simple Forums

Hi all!

My web design company does a lot of work in the Local Goverment/Not-For-Profit/Regeneration sector in the UK, and accessibility compliancy is an important factor in winning and completing online projects. One funder of a video archive we helped to design actually pulled the site apart line by line and sent us alternative javascripts that they felt helped make the site more accessible.

Now that's probably NOT the experience of most people using CMSMS but with recent legislation in both the UK and the States I suspect that anyone pitching  to build sites for organisations in the public sector will find it easier to win contracts if they can author to at least AA WAI/508 standard or even AAA. Also, given that helping the disabled or visually impaired to access the net is a 'good thing', we should all aim to build sites around these principles.

One of the things that attracted me to CMSMS from the start was that it had the cleanest code output of any CMS system I'd used including Mambo, typo3 etc. The flexibility of its templating system makes building accessible sites fairly straightforward. However, while finishing off a site the other day I came up with some simple ideas that could make it easier to add accessibility features from the admin backend.

1) Access keys - these can be a bit of a pain I know and of course they work badly in IE6 but for those who want to use them for menu items there could be a field which when given a value would add code like accesskey="A" to the tags of automatically generated menus like {bulletmenu}.

2) Same as above but specifying a Tab Order

3) Allow the contents of the title field to be added to the tag or create a new field for an extended title that screen readers could use to explain menu choices to the visually impaired.

4) The WAI also specifies that form elements should have labels and titles. Maybe fields for these could be added to the FeedbackForm module?

I'm sure people here could think of other possibilities for extending accessibility options in CMSMS. I really do feel that since none of the other CMS systems seem to even acknowledge this issue CMSMS has a real chance to shine and get adopted by organisations for whom this is a priority.

Sorry about the essay

I totally agree with you on this issue.  Section 508 compliance (in the States) is a huge thing for the company I work for.  Really, any government work requires it to some extent.  After 0.10 comes out and we start the cleanup for 1.0, we should seriously put time into making the default site run successfully through Bobby and get as much compliance as possible from a dynamically generated system.

The thought of being able to put that as a feature on the feature list is HUGE.  Maybe not so much at the moment, but it will become more and more important as time goes on.  And, as far as I know, we'd be the first.

Great idea!

Accessibility is getting more and more important. I have been working with WCAG issues for years now and hence have dealt with lots of CMS during this time. You will probably not be the first CMS to adopt WCAG levels (at least aiming at AA for AAA is almost impossible) but CMSMS could be the first CMS to pass the ATAG which would indeed be an enormous advantage. But this would include admin-mode as well.

Since this talk is accessibility related and the first step to accessibility is standard-compliance (and wishy reads this), I would like to draw your attention to this thread: http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.ph ... 923.0.html --- it is about character encoding and problems with chars "" and "&" that are not being encoded at all which makes the source invalid when using XHTML ...

If you are moving on with accessibility (like Drupal does since last release) I would like to share my knowledge here.

Regars
Nils

Yay! I was think ing I was the only one who cared about accessibility.

These and other features would all be welcome and go a long way towards making CMSMS the only system out there that has them.

eZ publish is the only CMS that seems to really make this claim but anyone who's ever made the mistake of going down that path would well understand why I'm here now.

1) Access keys - these can be a bit of a pain I know and of course they work badly in IE6 but for those who want to use them for menu items there could be a field which when given a value would add code like accesskey="A" to the tags of automatically generated menus like {bulletmenu}.

2) Same as above but specifying a Tab Order

This is very simple to make with this cms.

piratos: True, it is very easy to make.  But the whole admin needs to support it, and all included plugins and modules should do it by default.

As said in other threads, CMSMS could possibly be the first CMS to pass the ATAG, if we would just find some people who would work on it. But as wishy said we would need a concept that covers the whole system: frontend, backend, plugins, etc. and it is not only about visually impaired people. It is also about usability, like for example context sensitive help and stuff like that.

Regards,
Nils