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Re: Accessible Drupal themes

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From: Cliff Tyllick
Date: May 25, 2013 8:19AM

Jan, I'm glad you asked.

Drupal was the first CMS project—and it has developed well beyond being a CMS since then—to seriously take on the issue of accessibility. Starting with Drupal 7, people with disabilities could not only use sites created in Drupal but also use Drupal to create sites without encountering barriers.

As we know, nothing is 100 percent accessible to everyone, but a blind friend of mine noted one day that he had suddenly realized that he had been working on his website in Drupal 6 for hours and had not yet encountered anything that he couldn't easily do. (Many patches created for Drupal 7 were backported to Drupal 6 as soon as possible.)

A goodly number of sites in the accessibility sectorhave been created in Drupal, too.

Here are a few of the themes that can be used to produce more accessible Drupal sites:
* Genesis
* AdaptiveTheme
* Newswire
* Zen
* Omega
* DarkBlue
* Tarski
* Typebased

To learn more about Drupal and accessibility, read Drupal's accessibility statement or peruse the pages of the Drupal Accessibility Group. In fact, I welcome you to join our group (full disclosure: I am one of its organizers) and continue the discussion with us there.

Finally, I do have to acknowledge the work Joe Dolson and Joseph Karr O'Connor (I hope I'm not forgetting others) are inspiring to improve the accessibility of WordPress sites. I'll leave it to Jennifer Sutton and others who have WordPress blogs to comment on how accessible WordPress is as a development tool, but los dos Joes ;-) are doing great work to ensure that the websites produced in WordPress are accessible.

By the way, thanks for asking. I am proud of the progress made in making Drupal and Drupal sites accessible, and don't often get the opportunity to toot this horn.

Cliff Tyllick
Austin, Texas