Re: ATAG testing

Thanks for starting this tread Sean.

I’m a Drupal 8 Core Maintainer and have been looking at ATAG 2.0 now for a couple years.  The Drupal Community hasn’t officially adopted ATAG 2.0 as a standard, but I’m pretty confident that we’ve done more than any other CMS to build in ATAG 2.0 into our CMS by default. I know the WP folks are making great strides on accessibility, and hopefully other CMS’s are too, so please feel free to challenge me on this.

Graham, thanks for letting us know about Gutenberg and the direction for WordPress admin. Hopefully the new editor comes together well. Drupal is going with a “Proudly Found Elsewhere” approach for pieces like this where we can. This means that we can push up accessibility issues to a different community that will improve an even bigger chunk of the internet. 

As Michael pointed out, ATAG 2.0 is in 2 parts and Part A is ensuring that the backend meets WCAG 2.0 AA compliance.  Drupal has been a leader in this space since Drupal 7.  We wanted to see that a person with a disability can install, develop, administer, edit, publish and view their site.  In Drupal 8 we’ve improved upon the default accessibility in Drupal 7.  Jumping to HTML5 & adding WAI-ARIA has helped a great deal, as most admin interfaces are considerably more complex than the static pages. Most other CMS’s haven’t really even thought about the accessibility of their admin tools. 

The real interesting work though comes in Part B. Drupal 8 comes with CKEditor built in. It’s not a perfect WYSIWYG, but one of the reasons we chose it was because there had already been a lot of work done on it to see that it would help content authors make accessible content and indeed to be reasonably accessible.  I could go into a lot more detail about this, but you’ll see the output support figure/figcaption, use semantic markup, and that the interface can be navigated by keyboard-only users.  Greg, would love to have your feedback on CKEditor to see if it lives up to what you were working on TinyMCE.

We’ve got a bunch of ATAG 2.0 issues tagged here:
 https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/search?issue_tags=atag

We’ve done a range of things for Part B like:
 - requiring alt text by default 
 - making it easier to select an alternate language in the body of the page (Language of Parts).
 - set the defaults to allow headings to encourage properly structured text
 - added a lot of documentation about accessibility.
 - enabled spellcheck by default 
 - making it easier to create accessible dynamic tables 

We’re also trying to track our issues against the ATAG 2.0 standard:
 https://www.drupal.org/node/2034915

Having the developer community be aware of ATAG is also quite important for adoption.  Here are a few things I’ve done on this:
 http://openconcept.ca/blog/mike/web-accessibility-complicated-atag-necessary
 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/web-accessibility-atag-drupal-8-mike-gifford/
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z1tDXeqv0c
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuYxPZzCpbo

There is a great deal of work yet to be done on this. I’d love to have more folks working together on ways to, do things like:
 - incorporate automated testing tools into the site
 - have code to check for bad alt text (things like image-223.jpg)

By focusing on Core with Drupal, we can make big changes with the admin interfaces of sites that are implemented with Drupal. Because Drupal modules/themes use APIs to build pages, we can insert good patterns which are adopted by default when people follow best practices. It doesn’t mean that all Drupal modules or themes meet ATAG 2.0 or even WCAG 2.0 AA targets, but having good defaults makes it much easier for everyone to do the right thing. 

Drupal is GPL. It would be great to have folks from other communities look a the problems/solutions we’re struggling with (or have solved) and give their input into defining best practices for authoring tools. 

Mike
-- 
Mike Gifford, President, OpenConcept Consulting Inc. 
Drupal 8 Core Accessibility Maintainer - https://drupal.org/user/27930
Twitter: @mgifford @openconcept_ca

Open source web development for social change - http://openconcept.ca
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