WCAG 2.0: What every themer and developer should know

Web accessibility standards make a website usable for users with disabilities including limitations of vision, hearing, cognition, mobility, speech, and learning. The process for creating an accessible experience for a web site or CMS is controlled by not just one person, but by many components working together, and as such, each component is responsible for maintaining the process as a whole.

The WCAG 2.0 recommendation contains information that is easy to understand and break down into usable, applicable techniques for ensuring a fair user experience on any website. These techniques will be covered in this presentation as they relate to:

• theme development
• module development (how to make your module more accessible)
• popular modules (which are accessible, which need work)
• content creation and editing

Additionally, attendees will learn about:

• common mistakes and pitfalls, and what you can do to avoid them
• accessibility features being developed for and by the Drupal community
• what to look for in accessibility when implementing a contributed module or theme
• web accessibility's relationship with new web standards, including the mobile web

New accessibility problems are created with every new technology and impact all web users. The WCAG 2.0 Recommendation provides techniques for solving these new accessibility problems that exist for building web pages and applications. It also sheds new light on denser past, though still viable, even necessary, solutions to web accessibility issues.

Pre-requisites:
Attendees should have a working knowledge of how Drupal works, as well as what goes into developing or contributing on themes, modules, and documentation.

No matter what your role is in the accessibility process, there are steps you can take to improve the services of any component, from user agents, to authoring tools, to other developers. This presentation will help you understand what you can, and must, do.