[TYPO3] Accessibility: Typo3 vs other CMS

[Christopher Torgalson]

Hi Ries,

On 3/30/07, R. van Twisk <typo3 at rvt.dds.nl> wrote:
> Just to add my 2 cents....
>
> Since I am not disabled.... I always have a hard time to find
> out if what I create is accessible or not...
>
> i can imagine core developers have the same problem.
> We have been talking about a ajax based pagetree for a long time,
> and now it apparently it's not accessible (is it'). For
> 'us' spare time developers it's hard to make two interfaces.
> One flashy/ajax based interface that looks cool and is web2,
> and a accessible interface.


This is what I meant when I said that people don't really seem to
grasp that making web apps accessible need not be extravagantly
difficult. The basic strategy is to use javascript to /enhance/ what
your widget does. In the case of something like the page tree--and, I
would argue, the entire BE--this means:

1. Make it work without JS first
2. Add JS to improve the user experience
3. Provide User TSconfig options so that it's configurable on a per
group or user basis

No matter how it's done, the page tree and all the other stuff in the
BE is making server/db requests and delivering HTML. In the case of
something like the page tree or TCE forms, javascript could, in
principle, be used to override the href attribute of the links and do
an asynchronous request.

I know that this is not /currently/ possible, given that the entire BE
is riddled with javascript, but it is /not/ an insurmountably
difficult problem. If this strategy were adopted in general--and, if
the markup were also improved--we'd be well on the way to an
accessible BE. And to be honest, WAI Level 1 accessibility [1] is
quite a modest and achievable goal. The main problems are 6.1 [2], 6.2
[3] and 6.3 [4].

Furthermore, in a controlled environment such as the BE, and since we
are able to specify a restricted set of browsers (we do this already),
there is no major barrier to removing all those darned tables in the
layout.

<snip>

> but I think it's a huge amount
> more work to make some accessible, which does cost a lot of extra time
> to develop....

This is exactly backwards. For many purposes, you can consider
'accessible' to mean 'text-based'. Have you heard of the Target
lawsuit in the US? Target worked /very/ hard to make their pages
inaccessible--not including text links, not including alt texts and so
on. These things happen in TYPO3 too.

There's no question that it's a huge amount of work to change an
/existing/ tool as big as TYPO3, but the real discussion is about
version 5 where the whole application is supposedly going to be
rewritten. And when writing /new/ HTML code, it's absurd to claim that
accessibility is more difficult.

> Are there any big companies that want to spend for a accessable BE???

I don't know, but this is sort of the point: TYPO3 developers, at
least in Europe and North America are eventually going to start losing
contracts to developers using other CMS tools as the regulations
around web accessibility become more firmly established /because/ many
of those governments and companies will not pay extra to have TYPO3's
BE made more accessible when there are alternatives.


-- 
Christopher Torgalson
http://www.typo3apprentice.com/

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/wai-pageauth.html#tech-scripts
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/wai-pageauth.html#tech-order-style-sheets
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/wai-pageauth.html#tech-scripts
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/wai-pageauth.html#tech-dynamic-source