Drupal 2024 GAAD Pledge Update on Accessibility

The Drupal Association has provided an update on its Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) Pledge for 2024, highlighting ongoing efforts to improve accessibility within the Drupal platform. Written by Mike Gifford on behalf of the Drupal accessibility maintainers, the update emphasizes Drupal's long-standing commitment to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines. With a history of delaying releases to ensure accessibility compliance, the Drupal community continues to strive for inclusivity.

Drupal's current development focuses on adhering to WCAG 2.2 AA standards, the latest recommendation from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The GAAD Foundation nominated Drupal for the 2022 GAAD Pledge, which mandates projects to update their guidelines to WCAG 2.1. The update notes that the Accessibility Team has published a draft Accessibility Coding Standards document to educate the community and track accessibility issues. Presently, there are 1,063 open accessibility issues in Drupal Core and Contrib, with 510 specific to Drupal 11. Notably, 188 of these issues are tagged against a WCAG Success Criterion, primarily affecting edge cases.

The update identifies frequent accessibility failures in Drupal, including non-text content, contrast minimum, and keyboard accessibility. The team has also developed an Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) using the US General Service Administration’s OpenACR. 

"We always need more members of the Drupal community to become involved. The earlier we catch accessibility issues, the cheaper it will be to fix them, and the more robust our solutions will become."

concludes Mike Gifford, promoting participation in Global Accessibility Awareness Day to share best practices and enhance the platform's accessibility. Read the full update here.