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Re: Best accessible CMS

for

From: Mike Gifford
Date: Feb 13, 2017 7:46AM

I usually get to this list via Google when I'm searching for some interesting conversation that comes up. That or someone points me to a discussion as happened today.

I've got some vested interests in this, but let's start with some basics.

1) The most accessible CMS is one that is going to be open-source.

Open-source software allows for ideas to be shared back/forth more easily than any other approach to software development. Community driven software allows for people with disabilities to get engaged and fix the barriers that affect them. By having open issue queues, people can easily search to find errors, identify common pain points, and act collectively to fix the problem.

Accessibility is a big challenge. It requires collaboration as it is a journey, not a destination. Processes like the Theme Accessibility: Guide for Reviewers should be replicated where possible in other projects:
http://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/theme-accessibility-guide-for-reviewers/ <http://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/theme-accessibility-guide-for-reviewers/>;

Likewise efforts to replicate centralized:
- CSS classes to provide invisible, hidden & on focus controls
- Tabbing control javascript
- aria-live support

in other projects.


2) We can't just be thinking about the theme layer

It's pretty easy to throw a pretty accessible theme on almost any HTML. Although it is important, it is one of many issues. WordPress is doing some great work with the "accessibility-ready- tag as Jennifer Sutton already noted. This certainly helps people make better choices. Unfortunately a lot of accessibility is about semantics which are deeper than the theme layer of most CMS's. Fortunately both WordPress & Drupal are doing a good job of improving the accessibility of the Core code.

Ultimately it's about changing the culture of developers and designers so that everyone has more awareness about accessibility issues. Drupal has come a long ways and it is clear that WordPress is catching up quickly.


3) An accessible CMS is one that helps authors produce accessible content

Drupal 8's made some real progress on implementing suggestions from the W3C's ATAG 2.0 guidelines. Things like requiring alt-tags on images by default. These aren't simple changes and require more than simply seeing that both the front-end & back-end meet WCAG 2.0 AA guidelines. We've made changes to see that content authors have more guidance in producing accessible content.

If you know your content authors understand accessibility, then this isn't an important feature.


4) Administrators may have disabilities

Since Drupal 7 we have tried to see that we are eliminating barriers at all levels for people with disabilities. You should be able to use the site, edit content, do site administration as well as development. We've focused on Drupal Core, but much of the work we've done in core affects all of the modules & themes because of the APIs that are used. In Drupal 7, administrators with disabilities would have trouble with the contributed Views module, but this has been incorporated into Drupal 8 Core and as such has had it's accessibility improved considerably.

Overlooking the accessibility of administration tools is a big oversight for organizations.


5) WordPress vs Drupal

There's a lot of debate between the two. Ultimately there are some sites that are going to be easier to implement with WordPress and others that are going to be easier to implement with Drupal. It really depends on what you are trying to do. We regularly tell folks to build with WordPress if they want a simple site with a blog. Not that WordPress can't do more than that, but they are generally trying to serve different markets. Drupal's user interface has improved considerably since Drupal 6 and many of the UI comparisons are a bit out of date.

There are things that are much easier to do in Drupal than WordPress. It really depends on what you want to do. It also depends on how your developer is used to doing them. If you are an institution with complex administrator permission which needs to be both multi-lingual and accessible, don't start with WordPress.


Anyways, those are my 2cents from my rather biased perspective.

Mike
--
Mike Gifford, President, OpenConcept Consulting Inc.
Drupal 8 Core Accessibility Maintainer - https://drupal.org/user/27930 <https://drupal.org/user/27930>
Twitter: @mgifford @openconcept_ca

Open source web development for social change - http://openconcept.ca <http://openconcept.ca/>;
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