Enhancing Accessibility in Drupal's CMS

Drupal is a leading open source content management platform and is already
very standards compliant out of the box. Given this, many accessibility
challenges are already met, however it is a complex and changing target and
with the recent release of WCAG 2.0 there are many additional challenges
that websites will need to embrace to become more accessible to people with
disabilities. Given the rising number of people with accessibility
challenges and the increasing importance of the web as a means of
interacting with society, it is not surprising that there are new legal and
financial incentives to make sites more accessible to everyone. Designing
for screen readers is becoming more important, but there are different
conventions that need to be implemented to allow non-sighted people to
easily navigate the site. The proper use of alt tags is the widest
understood issue, but there are many other techniques that are as important,
some of which can be coded into the default code of Drupal.

Openconcept has been involved in testing & pushing Drupal 7 (the development
version) to be more accessible out of the box. By doing so we hope to make
many more websites accessible by default. In working with an open source
community on this issue we are able to engage with a wide group of users and developers to
test solutions, find best practices and promote better practices. The open
source community is well suited for the challenges of accessibility issues
because the cost of proper implementation for most other software solutions
is just too high. The talk will touch on some of the approaches we've taken
to improving accessibility in future versions of Drupal and hopefully
provide some insights into other projects as well.