Great Place To Work® has certified Axelerant as among India’s 40 Best Workplaces in Health & Wellness.
Want to give back to the Drupal Community without writing a line of code? Volunteer to help out at MidCamp. We’re looking for amazing people to help with all kinds of tasks throughout the event including:
For setup, we need help making sure registration is ready to roll, getting hats ready to move, and getting the rooms and walkways prepped for our amazing sessions.
For teardown, we need to undo all the setup including packing up all the rooms, the registration desk, cleaning signage, and making it look like we were never there.
We need ticket scanners, program dispersers, and people to answer questions.
Pick your sessions and count heads, intro the speakers and make sure they have what they need to survive, and help with the in-room A/V (by calling our Fearless Leader / A/V Genius)
This year we're going to be giving every volunteer credit on Drupal.org, so be sure to include your profile name when you sign up to volunteer.
If you’re interested in volunteering or would like to find out more, please reach out in the #volunteers channel on the MidCamp Slack.
Please see the embedded Volunteer Packet below for more details. Also, there will be a brief, online orientation leading up to the event to go over the volunteer opportunities more in detail.
tweet: @midcamp
email: info@midcamp.org
Four of our colleagues at Cocomore happily packed their bags to travel to Prague and spend a few days with our fellow Drupal community members, partners of our agency, and clients.Co-authors: Vladimir Roudakov, Lisa McCray
The industry summits at DrupalCon are a great way to get the most out of your conference experience if you’re a government or higher education professional. Summits are full day sessions scheduled when there are no general conference sessions happening, so you won’t miss anything from the main event.
Although the Summits are part of the DrupalCon program, they are separate events and require a separate registration. There is also an additional cost associated with Summit registration. It’s an additional $250, and you can add a summit package to regular registration all through one convenient platform.
Whether you are a web developer, administrator, or educator, you will gain valuable insights into how other institutions have used Drupal to improve their websites, streamline processes, and enhance the student experience. The Higher Ed Summit is the perfect meeting ground for folks doing Drupal in a higher education context. Pittsburgh is a huge Drupal higher education city, with both Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh using Drupal!
Thursday, 8 June, 2023 from 9:00-16:00 EST
The DrupalCon Higher Education Summit is a must-attend summit for anyone working in the higher education sector. This summit provides a unique opportunity to network and collaborate with experts and professionals in the field. Attendees will have the chance to learn about the latest trends and best practices in higher education technology and hear from leading experts in the field.
Attending the DrupalCon Higher Education Summit is a great investment in your professional development. The summit provides a wealth of knowledge and resources that you can use to improve your skills and stay ahead of the curve in higher education technology. With a focus on cutting-edge technology, best practices, and real-world examples, the DrupalCon Higher Education Summit is a must-attend event for anyone looking to stay ahead in the fast-paced world of higher education technology.
One of the key benefits of attending the DrupalCon Higher Education Summit is the opportunity to learn from real-world case studies and practical applications. You will also have the chance to engage with peers and share your own experiences and challenges.
Carnegie Mellon and Pitt are 14 and 10 minutes, respectively, away from the David L. Lawrence Convention center! Take a stroll through these historic campuses, where there’s a rich history of computer science and academic achievement. Both campuses have beautiful cathedrals with incredible architecture that make for the perfect peaceful afternoon.
Fountain outside of the Cathedral of Learning, Pitt
Image source: By Christopher Lancaster from Oshawa, Canada - 20080621_2744 Uploaded by crazypaco, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6625882
Are you a federal, state, or local government employee, or a private sector employee supporting the government?
Will attending the DrupalCon Government Summit makes you feel this excited? Probably!
Image source: Wikimedia, Fair Use
Then I’ve got great news for you! We can help with two out of three of those! Yinz should make plans to attend the DrupalCon Pittsburgh Government Summit. We have a full day planned of government-y goodness that you won’t want to miss.
Thursday, 8 June, 2023 from 9:00-16:00 EST
The Government Summit is intended for anyone who uses Drupal in the context of government, whether it be at a local, state or federal level. All skill levels and roles are welcome. You’ll meet site builders, developers, themers, project managers, support specialists, and more.
This year we are returning to the full day format, and will be featuring a panel, case studies, presentations, and plenty of talk and discussion on topics such as approaches to content author training, the impact of accessibility work, how to design *with* Drupal’s strengths to support agency needs, and much much more! Specifics on presentations and topics are being ironed out now, so stay tuned for more detail.
In addition, similar to past years, part of our schedule will be dedicated to “unconference” table-talk time with interactive discussions on topics chosen by you, the attendees. We like to think of them as mini-BoFs. Tables can form to continue the discussions from earlier in the day or your own unique topics. Opportunities to suggest topics will be available throughout the morning.
While the Government Summit will sadly have a distinct lack of movie prop bicycles, you are in luck! It turns out that one of the 4 bikes used in the filming of the movie is on display just across the river at Bicycle Heaven, which, according to Wikipedia, is the largest transportation museum in the world dedicated to bicycles. It’s also free to visit, so if you want to see that bike or any of its approximately 3500 friends, roll on over and check it out!
Just like land, air, and water are meant for everyone, the web was designed to work for all people and expel any hindrance, irrespective of the surroundings and capabilities of people. But the effect of incapacity (of individuals) in the light of the fact that the web standards don’t include all in itself has become a barrier. Creating quite the paradox in the situation.
Before completing this blog, my ignorance led me to believe that web accessibility was limited to ‘accessibility only for people with disability’. Another thing that I was coxed to believe was that it is almost synonymous with visibility issues. But it is as much for a person with auditory disabilities as it is for a person with cognitive or neurological disabilities. However, I realized I was not the only one associating such wrong notions with disabilities and web accessibility.
Lack of awareness and taboos associated with disabilities often mislead us.
Ensuring that people with disability have equal and inclusive access to the resources on the web, governments and agencies follow certain guidelines in order to establish equal accessibility for all without any bias.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) explains how the web content be made more accessible to people. Here the word "content" refers to any and every kind of information in a web page, such as text (include heading and captions too), images, sounds, codes, markup - anything that defines the layout and framework.
“WCAG is developed through the World Wide Web Consortium process with a goal of providing a single shared standard for web content accessibility that meets the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally.”
Take examples of physical infrastructures like ramps and digital vision signboards, which can be used by anyone, in a similar fashion web accessibility is for everyone.
When you go out in the noon, the level of contrast can be an issue as much for a person with 6/6 vision as it can be for a person with visibility issues. Or say, older people (due to aging) face problems with changing abilities, as much as people with “temporary disabilities” such as a broken arm or lost glasses. Thus, not only web accessibility standards ensure justice for people with disability but, it is inclusive for all.
According to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities by the United Nations, enjoying equal human rights is a fundamental freedom. To ensure the dignity of people with disability is not a subject of ridicule, governments across the globe signed a treaty for easy web accessibility.
A person may face an issue either when building a website or when using it. The WCAG ensures that both the times the guidelines are followed. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines are then divided into two: ATAG 2.0 and WCAG 2.0. Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG 2.0) addresses authoring tools and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) addresses Web content and is used by developers, authoring tools, and accessibility evaluation tools.
Drupal conforms to both the guidelines. The initiative started with Drupal 7 accessibility and the community has been committed to ensuring that accessibility for all.
The community has an accessibility team which works to identify the barriers both at the code level and the awareness level to resolve them. As a person using assistive technologies to browse the web, Drupal is built to encourage and support the semantic markup (which comes out-of-box in Drupal now).
One can realize that the improvements are meant for both the visitor and administrator in the:
Following are some of the Drupal modules which will assist you in keeping up with the accessibility standards.
In most of the surveys, poor contrast level is often cited as the most commonly overlooked feature by the developers.
High Contrast module, provides a quick solution to allow the user to switch between the active theme and a high contrast version of it helping them pull out of the problem.
htmLawed
According to the "Ten Common Accessibility Problems" an article by Roger Hudson, failure to use HTML header elements appropriately is one of the key accessibility issues.
The htmLawed module utilizes the htmLawed PHP library to limit and filter HTML for consistency with site administrator policy and standards and for security. Use of the htmLawed library allows for highly customizable control of HTML markup.
Style Switcher
The Style Switcher module takes the fuss out of creating themes or building sites with alternate stylesheets. Most of the accessibility issues have been confronted at the theming level. With this module, themers can provide a theme with alternate stylesheets. Site builder can add other alternate stylesheets right in the admin section to bring it under the right guidelines of accessibility. Allowing special styling of some part of the site, the module presents all those styles as a block with links. So any site user is able to choose the style of the site he/she prefers.
Text Resize
The handiest feature giving the end users just the right autonomy to resize the text as per their comfort of the eyesight. The Text Resize module provides the end-users with a block that can be used to quickly change the font size of text on your Drupal site.
It includes two buttons that can increase and decrease the size of the printed text on the page.
Accessibility
A module for the developer, Accessibility module gives you a list of available Accessibility tests, (most of which are) aligned with one or more guidelines like WCAG 2.0 or Section 508.
It immediately informs the site maintainer about the missing an “alt” attribute in an image, or if the headers are used appropriately. Further, each test can be customized to fit your site’s specific challenges, and customize messages users see for each test so that you can provide tips on fixing accessibility problems within the context of your site’s editing environment.
Other than the modules that can assist you to overcome web compatibility issues, here is a list of top Drupal features for easier web accessibility.
Drupal 8 is based on HTML5. Presenting new and better semantic components HTML5 is, in fact, one of five major initiatives outlined in Drupal development. It allows theme developers to control where to use the new semantic elements and opt out entirely if they so choose.
When we compose semantically correct HTML, we’re telling the browser and the assistive technology what type of content it is managing with and how that information relates to other content. By doing this, assistive technology is all the more effortlessly ready to carry out its activity since it has a structure that it can work with.Drupal forms have turned out to be impressively more open to the expansion of available inline form errors. It is now easier for everyone to identify what errors they might have made when filling in a web form.
Conclusion
However good the features Drupal offers, in the end, it is up to the organizations to strategize and build the websites and applications around the web accessibility.
We ensure that our different teams and interaction work together in order to make the Web more accessible to people with disabilities. At OpenSense Labs we design and develop the web technologies to ensure universal accessibility. Connect with us at hello@opensenselabs.com to make the web a better place.
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OffWe’ve been busy… so busy we haven’t been able to tell you what’s been happening! Here’s everything you need to know about with MidCamp just 5 weeks away!
With help from the community, our venue, and outside professionals, we’ve completed the MidCamp 2023 Health & Safety Policy. The policy is rooted in our values but is reflective of current conditions and our capacity as a fully volunteer-led team.
We’ve done our best to get this published and sincerely hope this works for you, but if it doesn’t you may request a full refund of your ticket at any time prior to the event by emailing info@midcamp.org.
We’ve got a great line-up this year! All sessions on Wednesday and Thursday (April 26-27) are included in the price of your MidCamp registration. We encourage you to start plotting your days now -- and get ready for some great learning opportunities!
MidCamp is committed to being accessible to anyone and everyone who is interested in learning and participating in our community. We'll teach you, we'll feed you, and we'll welcome you with open arms. If you don't fit into any of our public ticket categories, we have an option for you. Get your sponsored ticket here.
Know any students interested in learning about Drupal? We have discounted tickets ($25!) available for students to join us at MidCamp and learn more about the community! There are sessions for everyone—topics range from Site Building and DevOps to Project Management and Design.
