Joomla! Accessibility

A quick guide to creating accessible websites with Joomla!

Understanding how to create accessible websites is an essential skill these days . You may even be obliged by law to create websites that are usable by the widest audience, including people with a range of disabilities.

This book looks at what accessibility is and the various reasons, such as legislative or legal, as to why you really need to understand accessibility and then create websites that can be used by everyone.

This book therefore examines the diverse range of user requirements that need to be considered for humans to successfully use web technologies.

If you have no experience of being around, or working with, people with disabilities then it can be very difficult to successfully design user interfaces that cover their needs. This book will show you how you can both understand some of the various needs of people with disabilities and the technology they use to interact with computers and the Web.

What you will learn from this book

• Get under the hood with Joomla! and learn how to modify Joomla! HTML output in order to make more accessible websites.
  
• Understand how to use WYSIWYG editors like TinyMCE and XStandard to create accessible content.
  
• Create accessible Joomla! templates.
  
• Understand some of the most popular assistive technologies (AT) and how they work.
  
• Gain a deeper understanding of some different disabilities.
  
• Get an overview of the legal requirement to be accessible.
  
• Gain some very practical guidance based on the authors’ years of practical experience working as a web developer and with people with disabilities.

Approach
This is a practical book that contains many step-by-step examples for the reader to get their teeth into. Primarily, the book is designed to help the reader gain a deeper understanding of Joomla! and accessibility, but it can also be read as an introduction to assistive technology, disability, and the diversity of user requirements.

The book also attempts to de-mystify accessibility and take it off the theoretical platform and firmly root it in the real world with tangible benefits for users of Joomla!.

Who this book is written for
This book is a guide to any Joomla! user who wants to make their sites more accessible and the author does assume that you have a basic working knowledge of Joomla!. You don’t need to know anything about accessibility -- the author tells you all that you need to know to make your Joomla! sites accessible to the widest audience.

While some design skills and technical knowledge of HTML, CSS and PHP will be very useful you will still benefit from reading this book if you wish to understand more about assistive technology and the needs of people with disabilities. The book is distilled from years of hands on experience that the author has as a web developer and also working with people with disabilities.

About the Author
Joshue O Connor is Senior Accessibility Consultant with CFIT (Centre For Inclusive Technology).

CFIT is a part of the NCBI (National Council For The Blind of Ireland) and is a not-for-profit organization that provides expert advice and services to public and private sector organizations. These services include user testing, accessibility auditing and consultancy.

Joshue has a creative background in Graphic Design, which lead to Web Development and New Media Training. After several years in the shark infested waters of the private sector, through IT training, he got to work teaching people with a wide range of physical and cognitive disabilities.

This was an invaluable hands-on experience that brought him into contact with a diverse range of Assistive Technology users, who found technology a positive and enabling force in their lives. A natural gravitation towards Web Accessibility thus blossomed.

Joshue is skilled in the design and development of accessible websites and has a deep understanding of the diversity of user requirements. He is a member of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS), the Web Standards Project ILG (WaSP ILG), the Irish Design For All E-Accessibility Network (Irl-Dean), the IIA User Experience Working Group (UEWG), EUAIN, and the HTML 5 Working Group. This is his first book, contributions to obscure academic papers notwithstanding.

In his spare time he hangs out with his plants, studies computer science, plays Irish traditional music badly, and runs a small record label TechRecord.