Improve your website's accessibility with Drupal
With the launch of Drupal 8 in 2015, the modern avatar of Drupal, has generated a new kind of buzz amongst web development communities. With this release, the Drupal CMS turned itself into a system to create ambitious digital experiences and offers numerous, exciting ways of editing and publishing content to the World Wide Web, life is definitely going to be easy for users and developers.
Drupal will chart new paths to create experiences that work well with humans, at the same time support machines to understand the content. ie Search Engines and Screen Readers. It is also possible to create websites with Drupal that follow accessibility standards and guidelines.
To understand more, let us explore the various Drupal's Accessibility features:
Addition to Semantics
Assistive technology is bound to benefit greatly from the provision of semantic HTML5 elements in Drupal 8. Inclusion of live regions, properties, roles and WAI-ARIA landmarks will further leverage this benefit as a welcome addition.
Audio Alerts
With Drupal.announce() playing an integral role in the Drupal core, it is now possible for users to send well-timed alerts to aural users. Instructions can now be passed on to screen readers in JavaScript to be read as polite or assertive messages. Drupal will also implement the transition of translated strings along with altering the priority of messages.
Inline form errors will be available
Inline form errors have made Drupal forms more accessible, as it is a fairly easy task to identify the errors one has committed while filling up a web form.
Tab order control
The introduction of the Tabbing manager in Drupal will provide easy navigation and movement across complicated user interfaces. It is a welcome addition for accessing the prominent features on a page in a proper logical order and is bound to support non-mouse and non-visual users alike.
Field-sets upgraded
In order to further enhance Drupal forms, the use of field-sets in Form API is being initiated in Drupal. It is also applicable in the advanced search option.
Use of Alt Text
Alternative text is now a default function in the latest Drupal version and can be easily rewritten using ImageFields and CKEditor.
With the presence of Drupal and the above-mentioned accessibility features, we, at Zyxware, are confident that the buzz and excitement it has generated is more than justified. Get in touch with our team to know more about our Drupal development services and assure yourself of a seamless and hassle-free migration to the latest version of Drupal.
References
Make Your Website Easily Accessible with Drupal 8 Drupal 8 Has Enhanced Accessibility Features and Why That Matters
