WCAG 2.0 - What Every Themer and Developer Should Know

In December 2008, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 came out as a recommendation for making new websites accessible and usable by users with disabilities including limitations of vision, hearing, cognition, learning, and motor skills.

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, including those employing new content types and technology. These techniques will be covered in this presentation as they relate to:

• theme development
• 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.

This is also a session I have submitted for DrupalCon Paris.