Drupal Community Urged to Contribute Towards Accessibility

Every year, the third Thursday of May is celebrated as Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). The world observed this year’s GAAD on 18, May. On that day, Drupal Association published a blog post on behalf of the Drupal accessibility maintainers. The post was authored by Mike Gifford.

According to the blog post, Drupal has been committed to accessibility since the release of Drupal 7 in 2011. The core team worked on including accessibility releases for both front-end and back-end user interfaces, making it one of the first content publishing tools to prioritize accessibility accommodations for people with disabilities. This demonstrated the community's strong commitment to accessibility.

Drupal was nominated for the 2022 GAAD Pledge, which required projects to update their guidelines to WCAG 2.1 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). While Drupal had informally embraced WCAG 2.1 for some time, it made a formal commitment to follow the latest W3C WCAG Recommendation, which includes WCAG 2.2 and WCAG 3.0.
Drupal actively tracks accessibility issues in Drupal Core and Contrib, with a significant number of open issues.

The complexity of the user interface and the active developer community contribute to the volume of issues. To address this, Drupal has started tagging issues for WCAG Success Criteria to better understand their impact and create an Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR). They aim to provide a machine-readable ACR in every release of Drupal Core.

The blog post urges the Drupal community to get involved in furthering accessibility efforts, catching errors earlier, and to share best practices and learn from each other. Click here to read the blog post.