WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

RE: ColdFusion, PHP, etc. and accessibility

for

From: Kynn Bartlett
Date: Jan 15, 2002 10:31AM

At 12:36 PM -0700 1/14/02, Paul Bohman wrote:
>At this point in time, I don't know which content management systems best
>conform to the authoring tool guidelines.

Reef doesn't!

One thing more to add, as someone previously employed by a CMS maker,
is that in most cases it is possible to provide your own templates
and design your own custom output for nearly anything generated by a
CMS. This is in fact the usual way in which a CMS is used -- very
rarely is one used "out of the box". So this inserts an extra person
into the mix, the integrator.

The programmer creates the system software.
The integrator adapts the package for use by this specific company.
The user-author provides the information into the system and thus updates
the pages.

While it would be nice for the programmer to include accessibility
considerations by default, it probably won't happen because most of
them don't know much about accessibility and many large companies
think of accessibility as an "add-on" rather than a "core feature
requirement." In fact, it's not surprising to see companies now
producing special "508 plug-ins" or "accessibility expansions"
for products, since they can then sell them as extra products to
U.S. government entities, rather than making the whole product
accessible.

Therefore the most important person in this process is the integrator
who designs and tweaks the installation of the software for use
by the user-authors.

--Kynn

--
Kynn Bartlett < <EMAIL REMOVED> > http://kynn.com
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain http://idyllmtn.com
Web Accessibility Expert-for-hire http://kynn.com/resume
January Web Accessibility eCourse http://kynn.com/+d201
Forthcoming: Teach Yourself CSS in 24 Hours


---
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or view list archives,
visit http://www.webaim.org/discussion/