How to make your Drupal site Accessible (WCAG)

Submitted by ravisagar on Sat, 09/08/2012 - 10:15

These days we are busy working on a project that requires the Drupal site to be Accessibile for Visually Disabled persons. This is for the first time we are working on such project and we are really excited to dive into this new domain.

So how does the site become Accessible?

There are various screen reader softwares like JAWS and NVDA (Open Source). These softwares will read out the site content to the users but for that the site should follow proper use of semantic markup.

How can you make your site Accessible?

Just go through the following like http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/ where you will find wide range of recommendations to make your website accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness, low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these. Just go through the above like and you can find out rest of the details.

Accessibility in Drupal

Drupal is built to support the proper use of semantic markup and most of the screen readers should be able to navigate through the Drupal site but of course a lot of things need to be improved.

I am sharing some of the links below if you want to get started with Accessibility in Drupal, these links will give you sufficient information to start with.

If you want to learn about how to make Drupal site accessible and also be able to contribute then you can start by joining http://groups.drupal.org/accessibility group.

Drupal Themes that are Accessibile

These themes may not be 100% accessible right now but since these themes' developers have pledged to make their themes as accessible as it can be so you can give them a try.