As I have heard, Drupal 6.12 and 5.18 released somehow I found your link.

Thank you very much for your explanation,

Best regards from Istanbul

I think conventions are a good idea, but half the trouble (fun?) of accessibility is that it often depends on context and requires a considered decision to be made about which technique best solves the problem.

I’ve been thinking a bit about this, and trying to identify the various use-cases and user groups/needs and have made a start with a comment (http://drupal.org/node/386462#comment-1611534) on the thread about skip links because that’s an easily identified and very specific use-case with a reasonably easy solution (that can also be easily overridden if the site builder chooses).

With any luck that’ll be more clarifying than confusing and we can then move on to the others and perhaps reach some kind of consensus (over-optimistic? moi?) on the best way to resolve the hiding/showing content issue.

Perhaps though having something like this would help clarify the purpose:

.remove {
display: none;
visibility: hidden;
}
.invisible {
height:0;
overflow: hidden;
}
.offscreen {
position: absolute;
left: -999em;
width: 1em;
overflow: hidden;
}

I also didn’t set up a .hide class as it’s already been used so many times (and not used well).

The problem is there are very few conventions, and module and theme developers love inventing new classes and using 3 different techniques to do the same thing.

If we could have a couple of classes to use such as:

.remove {}
.hide {}

That would at least be a convention everyone would be familiar with and could trust, meaning we know it gives the desired behaviour.

BTW, thanks for your input in the Accessibility theming documentation on drupal.org, must appreciated and nice to see you there!

That being said, accessibility for contributors & administrators (ATAG) is a problem in all CMS’s. I think that Drupal 7 holds the promise of being the most accessible CMS of 2010.

One of the big outstanding issues is CSS & display:none; that we really need to get resolved for D7 – http://drupal.org/node/58941

I’ve got a sandbox up here which is working to demonstrate some of the accessibility patches http://drupal7.dev.openconcept.ca/

There are a number of issues that need to get resolved before we start styling up the admin interface for usability as far as I am concerned. This is a reasonable example – http://drupal.org/node/451980

Unfortunately, I think that simple test needs to be updated before this patch is accepted.

This is one of many known form issues that are identified in this list of issues – http://drupal.org/node/364629

I agree that support for ARIA roles would be great, but but for the moment it feels more sensible to concentrate on getting the basic interaction solid and as close to right as we can get, and then move on to the enhancements, but it’s duly noted

On the subject of techniques for hiding/showing content – the optimum technique varies depending on the desired behaviour.

If it’s intended to be hidden from all users, then display: none is appropriate, but if it’s something which is intended to be hidden from view but available to screen reader/non-css users, then moving it out of the viewport is more appropriate.

Of course, like so many things, it will often depend on the specific context, which can make giving a straight answer more complicated.

Still, it wouldn’t be any fun if we didn’t invent new ways of doing things that cause us to revisit techniques to determine whether or not they continue to be appropriate

If you can itemise them (for want of a better term) then I/we can either set your mind at rest, or add them to the list of things that still need a bit of accessibility love.

Seeing accessibility as something that can be “fixed” in implementation can often result in something which is technically accessible but the user experience leaves a lot to be desired (or makes it completely unusuable)… and that doesn’t even begin to cover the issues that arise when you try to shoe-horn accessibility features in at the last minute.

So I’m really excited to have the opportunity to get involved at this stage of the project, where I get to be a collaborator rather than an auditor, and also to be able to be so open about the work we’re doing.

Watch this space