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Are headless Drupal pages accessible?

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From: John P. Lee
Date: Jun 6, 2018 7:13PM

Hi all,

I was recently asked about the accessibility of headless Drupal by a web designer for a company that wants to ensure that their website design is accessible from the start. As you can see in their message below, they are wondering if they should be concerned about the fact that headless Drupal relies on Javascript to render and serve content. Should that be a deterrent for them? In looking through some of the WebAIM message archives, it seems as though most screen reader users have Javascript enabled nowadays, so using headless Drupal would not appear to be a problem. Is that indeed the case? Does this fall under "best practice"? (Please see the designer's message below):


"We're debating headless Drupal, vs. Decoupled Drupal, vs. traditional coupled Drupal. Here's some info on these three architectural styles https://www.coredna.com/blogs/headless-vs-decoupled-cms



We're wondering about the accessibility of headless Drupal because it relies on javascript to render and serve content.

We found these accessibility guidelines published by WebAim at https://webaim.org/techniques/javascript/

While WCAG 1.0 from 1999 required that pages be functional and accessible with scripting disabled, WCAG 2.0 [Which became the ISO standard in 2012] and all other modern guidelines allow you to require JavaScript.

Which seems to indicate that requiring javascript does not pose an accessibility problem.

... Does it?

In other words, if nothing on a web page were to load when a visitor has javascript disabled (or when their browser doesn't process javascript at all), would that be an accessibility liability, or would we be meeting the accessibility requirements if we choose to only serve content to visitors with javascript enabled?


Thanks,
John