Re: Accessible content management system

In my experience with CMS, open source like Plone and Joomla (until  
1.5) and proprietary like Sharepoint I was confronted all the time  
with two problems:

1)
Mix of metadata and HTML elements in back end source fields. For  
example the title of page use the same source field to produce for  
example:
<title>Manual de instruções das WCAG</title> and
<h1>Manual de instruções das <acronym title="Web Content Accessibility  
Guideline" lang="en">WCAG</acronym></h1>

For example in Contao, I only see the title field and it is used to  
produce <title> and others HTML elements. We only get:

<title>Manual de instruções das WCAG</title>
<h1>Manual de instruções das WCAG</h1> /* not conform to WCAG 1.0 -  
priority 1 */
<ul>
<li>Manual de instruções das WCAG</li> /* not conform to WCAG 1.0 -  
priority 1 */
...
</ul>

2)
The HTML editor is my main problem. I can't find a flexible editor  
that permit:
- an output conform with HTML standards;
- that use external CSS and do not use deprecated HTML attributes and/ 
or elements;
- that don't add (in a tentative to correct the code) things like  
<img ... border="0">
- that permit to mark the language changes throught the documents (we  
use it a lot in portuguese writing). Things like:
<span lang="en" xml:lang="en">just in time</span>
- almost all the HTML editors I know, when we introduce directly HTML  
then try to correct it and do bad things to our code. Almost in all my  
projects in Plone, Joomla, Sharepoint, Oracle, I don't use HTML  
editors. I use Dreamweaver and then copy/paste the info to the CMS.  
Shame of me! :-)
- etc.

I saw that Contao have techniques to make automatically things like  
"Good" by <span lang="en">Good</span>. This seems to me a weak  
solution. I need something more robust. In contao HTML editor I tried  
this:

<p>Este é um texto em <em lang="en" xml:lang="en">portuguese</em></p>

With Contao I write the paragraph; then select "portuguese" and press  
the button to <em>. So far, so good. Then, with the "portuguese" word  
selected, I press the button to introduce atributes in <em> element.  
The result was:

<p lang="en" xml:lang="en">Este é um texto em <em>portuguese</em></p>  
That is not what we want!

My dream is have the dreamweaver working directly to edit HTML in the  
fields of the CMS (I do it with copy/paste) and a power solution to do  
find/replaces directly in the DataBase (I do it with phpmyadmin when  
use MySQL).

Cheers, Jorge Fernandes


On 4 Aug 2011, at 10:37, Ian Sharpe wrote:

> Hi Phil
>
> Totally agree and would also re-emphasise the point that jim made in
> relation to this point as well as module or extension development.  
> No matter
> how well designed and conformant a CMS might be, it is always going  
> to be
> the case that the author of any given site must also consider the  
> theme  and
> any modules or extensions it uses in order to ensure a site is  
> accessible.
>
> The point I was making with regard to Plone, (and Drupal), is more  
> that both
> of these communities has expressed a strong desire or even  
> commitment to
> improve the accessiblity of their platforms which is encouraging. As  
> it is
> also encouraging to hear that blind people are successfully  
> administrating
> sites using Drupal or Contao for example.
>
> Cheers
> Ian
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]  
> On Behalf
> Of Phil Evans
> Sent: 04 August 2011 07:52
> To: flybynight
> Cc: 'Terry Dean'; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Accessible content management system
>
> Hi all,
>
> Just a very small contribution, as I don't use CMS at all:
>
>> As does Plone which also looks very good.
>
> Is this true? I have not used Plone from the developer point of  
> view, but a
> website which I visit regularly uses Plone. If I feed pages frmo that
> website to the W3C HTML validator they fail -- only a couple of  
> relatively
> minor errors, but nonetheless I (naively?) would hope that a CMS which
> aspires to serve accessible content will at least provide valid  
> content.
>
> As a side issue, which you're probably all aware of, no CMS could ever
> guarantee accessibilty on its own. For example, a (plone-based) site  
> I have
> used chose red on green as its colour scheme; ignoring that fact that
> red/green colour-blindness (very common) would render the page  
> unusable!
>
>
> Phil
>
>
>>
>> Typo3 would seem to be quite usable apparently although I haven't
>> spent any time looking into this at this stage.
>>
>> However, you may well want to take a look at contao:
>> http://www.contao.org
>>
>> Which looks very good from my initial view.
>>
>> I haven't validated it yet but it seemed very usable with only the
>> keyboard and has a nice clean and simple interface, while still  
>> having
>> all the features you'd expect to see in a leading CMS. It even has a
>> load of shortcut keys that are described in the main admin screen.  
>> You
>> can try the online demo from their home page.
>>
>> I'd be interested to hear what you and others think?
>>
>> Incidentally, have you looked at DNN recently? I'm guessing it hasn't
>> got any better but I do know they were keen on conformance with W3C
>> guidelines, although which ones I'm not exactly sure.
>>
>> Cheers
>> Ian
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] On
>> Behalf Of Terry Dean
>> Sent: 03 August 2011 21:14
>> To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
>> Subject: Re: Accessible content management system
>>
>> Hi Ian,
>>
>> If you do find one that conforms to the W3C Web Accessibility
>> guidelines please let me know. Its one thing to claim that a CMS is
>> compliant and another to actually be accessible.
>>
>> You only need to run a few accessibility tools over these CMSs to  
>> find
>> that they are generally full of problems.
>>
>> I dont claim to have the answers and I do not build these systems but
>> I can understand how difficult they must be to make compliant. I
>> remember trying to modify DotNetNuke in 2000 in order to validate it
>> to XHTML Strict 1.0 and gave up in the end.
>>
>> regards,
>>
>> Terry
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Ian Sharpe"<isforums@manx.net>
>> To: "'Terry Dean'"<Terry.Dean@chariot.net.au>;<w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
>> Sent: Wednesday, August 03, 2011 6:32 PM
>> Subject: RE: Accessible content management system
>>
>>
>>> Hi Terry
>>>
>>> While I understand where you're coming from and based on the  
>>> feedback
>>> I've received so far, would accept your belief that at this time,
>>> such a solution does not exist, I would challenge your statement  
>>> that
>>> this is not a serious question.
>>>
>>> Much of the web these days is generated through CMSs and this is  
>>> only
>>> going to increase over time. One of the founding principals of the
>>> web for me at least is giving everyone the opportunity to have their
>>> say and hear what everyone else is saying. It follows that if  
>>> members
>>> of the disabled or less technically competant communities are unable
>>> to voice their opinions and thoughts as easily as those without any
>>> barriers to access and author content (particularly when it's in
>>> relation to accessing and authoring content), this voice will become
>>> quieter when it should be getting louder.
>>>
>>> Ensuring that there is at least one accessible and feature rich CMS
>>> would therefore seem vital in terms of the web's accessibility to  
>>> me.
>>>
>>> It is therefore a very serious question and while there doesn't
>>> appear to currently be a single solution, I hope that you are at
>>> least encouraged, even if only a little, by the comments others have
> made.
>>>
>>> Cheers
>>> ian
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> -------------------------
>
> Phil Evans,
> Swift Development Scientist
> X-ray and Observational Astronomy Group, University of Leicester
>
> Tel: +44 (0)116 252 5059
> Mobile: +44 (0)7780 980240
> pae9@star.le.ac.uk
> http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~pae9
> http://www.swift.ac.uk
>
> Follow me as a Swift scientist on Twitter: @swift_phil
> http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~pae9/twitter
>
>

Received on Thursday, 4 August 2011 11:02:18 UTC