WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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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