Forum OpenACS Development: WAI-AA compliance for OpenACS and .LRN

One of the goal for OpenACS 5.4 and .LRN 2.4 is to be fully WAI-AA compliant. Why accessibility is so important? it's now the law in USA and EU and most of all accessibility is a social matter.

Here is a quote from Introduction to Web Accessibility:

The Web is an increasingly important resource in many aspects of life: education, employment, government, commerce, health care, recreation, and more. It is essential that the Web be accessible in order to provide equal access and equal opportunity to people with disabilities. An accessible Web can also help people with disabilities more actively participate in society.

The Web offers the possibility of unprecedented access to information and interaction for many people with disabilities. That is, the accessibility barriers to print, audio, and visual media can be much more easily overcome through Web technologies.

Moreover, being accessible is a way to differenciate OpenACS/.LRN from its competitors, and is a consequent evolution to keep the leadership in the technology foundations (e.g. well written code and structural definition) for what OpenACS is acknowledged.

Accessibility has been addressed at first in .LRN 2.2 by Sydney University, implementing the Selva theme. That was the very first step. For .LRN 2.3, theme Zen has been implemented, another step towards WAI-AA. Now for OpenACS 5.4 and .LRN 2.4, we are working on making the tool fully WAI-AA compliant.

How do we address WAI-AA in OpenACS/.LRN? HTML 4.01 strict compliance is one of the basis to be able to reach WAI-AA level. This work is currently done (and almost finished) by the aDeNu group at UNED and consist of checking every single page in the toolkit, fixing the HTML and validating it.

Since level AA compliance is now a feature of OpenACS/.LRN (https://openacs.org/xowiki/%2eLRN_2%2e4), new developments and fixes committed to OpenACS repository should address it, at least the HTML 4.01 Strict compliance. To do so, before commiting, check your HTML using a validation tool. There's a wiki page (https://openacs.org/xowiki/dotlrn-zen-standards) that provides information about how to address accessibility in OpenACS/.LRN and more especially how to use validation tools (https://openacs.org/xowiki/dotlrn-zen-standards#accessibility).

We just finished to validate lorsm and we faced the problem of the values for the id attribute (not fixed yet). The id attribute has a type "ID" which:

ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".").

Many id have a value starting with a digit (usually an object_id) and that causes the validation to fail. It's something we'll have to fix as we find them and to take into account in further development.