WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: CMS Options

for

From: Cliff Tyllick
Date: Feb 5, 2016 8:26AM

Recently I helped Knowbility tweak the site for their ATSTAR program (training for teachers about disability and AT) recently. It's built in Drupal.

I participated in making Drupal 7 more accessible, but even I was impressed by the accessibility of that site—not just on the front end, but also on the back end. The latest release, Drupal 8, has taken compliance with ATAG to the next level, as well as responsive design.

If you're not familiar with ATAG, it's like WCAG but for authoring tools. Basically, it amounts to dealing with these questions:
' How accessible is the tool itself?
' How well does the tool support the creation of accessible content?

Just Wednesday, Mike Gifford of Open Concept Consulting gave a webinar about the accessibility features of Drupal 8. I'll see if I can find a public link to a recording.

That said, I honestly don't know if WordPress is robust enough for an enterprise-level CMS, but they have recently made huge gains in accessibility. So look into them, too. And of course you need to consider security, so weigh those issues based on your situation, too.

Others on this list have led the search for a vendor for their enterprise CMS, so I hope they will chime with insights based on their experience. But I think in looking for a vendor, I would require them to they do each of these in their proposals:
' Provide examples of sites they have developed that are accessible.
' Explain how the CMS they used supports accessibility.
' Demonstrate that the administrative interface is accessible.
' Show how they simplify the content creation interface. (Even with a perfect CMS, the developer would have to make many decisions that will affect the authoring interface. How did they ensure that people who need to reorganize sites could do that, but people who just contribute content weren't presented with an overwhelming array of options they aren't even supposed to touch?)
' No CMS is perfect. Explain what barriers to accessibility they discovered and what they did to solve the issue. Double bonus points if part of that answer is that they contributed their solution back to the open source community. If they were able to develop a module or theme that the community accepted and others now use, you can check the issue queue for that item for examples of how many problems their first attempt had, how well they understood the issues, and how well they solved those problems. The discussions they engaged in would even give you a good sense of how well they work with customers. Are they professional, responsive, and polite?

As I said, I'll be interested to see what others say.

Cliff Tyllick
Accessibility Specialist
Texas Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative Services

Sent from my iPhone
Although its spellcheck often saves me, all goofs in sent messages are its fault.

> On Feb 5, 2016, at 8:36 AM, Wu, Jingjing < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> Good morning, Liz!
>
> I am also interested in this topic. We don't have any CMS in use and are planning to find a proper one. How do you decide which vendors to invite?
>
> Thanks,
> Jingjing Wu
> Web Librarian
>
>