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Accessible CMS - was RE: form label question

for

From: Gareth Dart
Date: Aug 22, 2007 3:10AM

I'm renaming the thread as above.

Hi Sawang,

This is a bit of an old chestnut that pops up on the list from time to
time - if you search the list archives* you'll find that several reviews
of Content Management Systems have been carried out by contributors to
the list far more erudite than myself and posted on their blogs, etc:
the archives will contain links.

To get the ball rolling, though, I've found Joomla! 1.0.x to be
reasonably easy to adapt to produce accessible markup - at least to
Priority 1 standards (and indications were good for Priority 2). I seem
to recall that the consensus last time we all had this discussion was
that none of the CMSs produced completely accessible markup, but that
some were definitely better than others, and, in particular, open-source
solutions were better than proprietary ones (even if the reason was only
because one could edit the source code). I could be wrong, though -
search the archives.

One important point was that it was critical to ensure that your content
authors received training in web accessibility, if it was in your power
to do so - it quickly becomes a problem if they continually produce
inaccessible markup.

Cheers,

Gareth

* - The list archives can be searched here:
http://www.webaim.org/discussion/archives.php