RE: Accessible content management system

Couldn't agree more. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Morten Tollefsen [mailto:morten@medialt.no] 
Sent: 05 August 2011 15:28
To: Terry Dean; Ian Sharpe; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: SV: Accessible content management system

Hi!

I find this discussion both typical, interesting and a little bit
frustrating:-)!

It is not surprising that developers want standards. Standards are of course
important for html, css. Smil, javascript, ... 

Accessibility on the other hand is more comparable with human aspects of a
service/app/site like: creativity, usability, beautifulness,
understandability, ... CMS typically are flexible and creative tools, so
- to say that all output is accessible is perhaps very difficult! It is
however possible to produce accessible contents using several CMSes.
Unfortunately most of these systems are not too accessible as production
tools (at least this is my experience). In my company we therefore created
our own CMS some years ago because about 50% of the staff is visually
impaired.

I've not seen a validator capable of telling us if a site look nice?
But, it is possible to figure out if the stylesheet is valid? I've not seen
a validator capable of telling us if a text/scheme is understandable for a
user, but it is possible to figure out if the html code is valid. ... and so
on! The same is more or less the case for
accessibility: it's fairly easy to validate but still end up with important
accessibility problems. In other words: WCAG and other accessibility
guidelines are great tools. Even with great tools it is however possible to
build bad things.

Guidelines for accessibility are extremely helpful and WAI has done (and
still does) great work! As involved in several large web projects however, I
am sometimes shocked when project spend hundreds of howers discussing
information architecture, interaction design, infrastructure database
architecture etc. etc. And to make the hole thing accessible a set of
"GUIDELINES" or in the best case a small user test some days before the site
is lunched should guarantee "usability for all".

In most cases accessibility and even good usability is fairly easy, but if
the goal is to end up with really successful results, the solution is to
include universal design as an integrated development criteria!
Someone need to engage an expert (like for most other areas, e. g. the
example areas mentioned above), while others have their own accessibility
resources. Expertise must include to be able to find a representative test
group. Everybody knows that user testing is important, but in most cases
serious testing is given little priority (except in the principal speech:-).

- Morten

Received on Friday, 5 August 2011 14:43:31 UTC