Welcome back to the Drupal Advent Calendar. For our thirteenth door we are joined by Gareth Alexander, who is leading the Drupal CMS Accessibility Tools track.
When creating content there are so many things to consider: Target Audience, SEO issues like keyword relevance, making content that is actually engaging and relevant, and then there is the accessibility of your content as well.
With the Drupal CMS accessibility tools track we hope to provide a way to help with one part of that. These tools will help guide a content author to make and keep their content as accessible as possible with automated tools.
The Accessibility tools are not enabled by default in Drupal CMS, but they can be easily installed using project browser.
Once installed you will have a user-friendly accessibility checker that gives real time feedback while creating or editing your content.
There is some demo content also provided by the recipe which can be used to try out and get used to the new tool.
Editing that node will show several common issues faced by authors and the tool will offer advice on how to fix it. There is a clear explanation of any potential issues that may cause problems for users of assistive technology, so authors may gain some insight into why this task is important.
Working through the document will prepare any author for tackling their own content and making these improvements will not only affect the users of assistive technology but the will likely improve the experience of all your users. The changes being made can also have a positive benefit on others areas like SEO by ensuring content is well formed and properly structured.
Site owners and authors can track the overall accessibility of the site’s content using the Site-wide report, this will allow them to keep track of issues and ensure the site’s accessibility remains where they want it to be.
The Accessibility tools track is heavily utilising Editoria11y at the moment, but there are more improvements planned as soon as they are ready. The hope is to be able to tap into other 3rd party tools to get a variety of services being able to offer scanning services, so that any governance requirements can be easily met.
Gareth Alexander (the_g_bomb) lives in Edinburgh, Scotland and is an Acquia Certified Drupal developer working at Zoocha. He is an active member of the Drupal Core Accessibility team, and has been an active member of the Drupal community since 2010, through module and theme maintaining and being a part of Drupal Scotland. He is a Scout Leader and enjoys Dungeons and Dragons, Basketball and Football when not doing Drupal.
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