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Re: Accessible Open Source CRM

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From: John E. Brandt
Date: Apr 3, 2007 9:10AM

Juicy Studio did a review recently on their blog ...
http://juicystudio.com/article/choosing-an-accessible-cms.php

...which confirmed some of the evidence I've been collecting for the past
three years on this same topic.

The three open source CMS apps that rise to the top in their review are
Drupal, Joomal! and Plone. On the non-open source side, they gave high marks
to Quick & Easy CMS.

I've been playing with Joomla and Drupal for several months and written
about my experiences on my own blog
http://www.jebswebs.net/blog/index.php?itemid=3. (BTW, I had more data on
another blog that crashed and I lost my wonderful words of wisdom)

I have avoided Plone since it uses Python which is apparently very demanding
on server resources and since I am on a hosted system, it's not for me.

But the biggest accessibility challenge with CMSs or any on-line app is not
the application, it's the people using them. You can have the most
accessible application that produces great standards-based and valid code,
but with all of these systems users can still manage to enter content in a
way that makes it inaccessible, or less accessible. The two biggies are:
cutting and pasting content from a word processor or another website (I see
this all the time with blog entries) and all kinds of "illegal" code comes
with it....and adding images with either no ALT text, incorrect ALT text, or
un-useful ALT text.

Bottom line, we still have to educate the masses!

~j


John E. Brandt
Augusta, Maine USA
www.jebswebs.com



-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Mike Osborne -
AccEase
Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2007 3:34 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] Accessible Open Source CRM

Is anybody using or do you know of a (preferably) open source CRM system
that is accessible?

Prefer open source so we can tailor it and prefer if it's PHP/MySQL as these
are our usual tools.

I've had a look at Sugar CRM but it looks rather large and complicated for
our needs and I'm not sure how acccessible it is.

We just need basic contacts, bring ups, and notes.

We are considering building but it feels like reinventing that round rolling
thing - albeit an accessible one!