Drupal Speaks — Aural UIs & new accessibility features

At DrupalCon Portland, I presented together with fellow Acquia Spark team member Jesse Beach on the accessibility improvements that we helped bring to Drupal 8. See http://portland2013.drupal.org/node/2158.

Drupal 8 will be the most accessible version of Drupal yet. We are expanding the foundational HTML markup support into APIs that make it easy to express the state of the page components, not just their properties. One example is Drupal.announce, which passes strings to an ARIA-live region to be read by a speaking User Agent. Another is simple management of tab ordering for constrained page navigation by keyboard (Drupal.TabbingManager). And we intend that these APIs be utilized throughout Drupal core and contrib.

As front-end developers, we are well familiar with oft-touted techniques of visual presentation — layouts, grids and typography to name a few. In this session, we will make the case for the aural user interface. Our pages should be accessible just as well by sound as they are by sight. The aural UI cannot be an afterthought. It must be designed, iterated and tested like any other UI.

Drupal 8 will provide the tools to build amazing aural UIs. Find out how you can incorporate these techniques into your modules so that your work will be accessible to the widest possible audience.