Joomla! Accessibility: A quick guide to creating accessible websites with Joomla!

While creating accessible websites with Joomla!, it is also important to understand the limits of the technology.

Joomla! will not magically transform anything the developer or author throws at into structured and accessible content. Although, sometimes we may wish this happens! We often, on a subconscious level, believe that new technology will automatically be able to fix everything so that we could then spend more time hanging out at the beach. However, this is unrealistic. Technological advances have not lead us to lives of leisure, rather we often work harder, deal with more diverse tasks, and for longer hours!

Within the context of using a Content Management System like Joomla! the old adage "garbage in—garbage out" holds true. It is important for you to understand that much of what you can do to create accessible websites comes from what you have acquired over time, with good development and design practices.

The manner in which you approach your web development...

Usability looks at the quality of the user experience and tries to determine how successfully a user can complete a task and how satisfying a device or interface is to use. Including usability in your workflow is also a very important part of good designing and development.

Areas where user interaction can be improved therefore come under usability. While usability and accessibility (strictly speaking) are different disciplines, there are close connections and crossovers between them.

Following are some definitions of usability picked from some good websites:

You may have your own knowledge and experience of accessibility. This could range from little, to a lot. It could be based on your experience, things you have read during your own research, or stuff that you have picked up from colleagues and fellow developers based on their experience and research.

You may not know any people with disabilities or any people who use assistive technology (AT). Much of what you have heard could come from second or third hand information that could either be wrong, or worse, misleading.

You may have downloaded a demo copy of a screen reader and realized that it a very complex piece of software that you can't just hop into and drive off with. Well, not smoothly anyway.

You may have read about certain assistive technology and are trying to picture in your mind how it may work. I am aware that this approach is very difficult. If it is possible for you to gain some hands-on being experience of being with people with disabilities and watch...

The WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) are an important set of guidelines and techniques that outline important areas to pay particular attention to when developing accessible websites. By following the guidelines and successfully passing their various checkpoints or success criteria, you will have gone a long way towards creating more accessible websites.

In this book I have chosen not to give you guidance on 'how to comply with WCAG', rather I have distilled my experience and covered many of the important areas, which when followed will serve the need of many of your users. You may also, happily, comply with many parts of the WCAG guidelines.

There are two sets of WCAG guidelines (version 1.0 and version 2.0). WCAG version 2.0 is still in draft. However, you could start reading version 1.0, but do keep an eye on the newer version which I have outlined next. The new guidelines are a major improvement and a promising evolution. They are not perfect but hey, evolution is...

While accessibility is very important it is not the full picture when it comes to a good user-interface design and there are other important aspects to be considered such as usability. For me, accessibility and usability make up a powerful combination for a potent holistic approach to web development and a positive user experience for everyone.

User testing is a really practical way of determining whether your sites are not only accessible but also usable, and this important method for qualitative analysis really does lift accessibility and usability out of the arena of being merely a theoretical or academic exercise.

User testing can really give you positive proof that all of your hard work—in getting to the point where you can say that your interfaces are accessible and usable—has really paid off.

Regarding WCAG, much of what is suggested in the WCAG guidelines is in many ways common sense, if you give it some thought. What I hope to do is provide you with a step-by-step way of creating...