How Accessibility Improves Through Open-source Collaboration

Active collaboration with open-source software communities will inevitably improve the accessibility your website. Drupal is a great platform that has truly benefited from the input of accessibility experts and users with disabilities around the world. Engaging in this transparent community allows you to put forward your best solution and work together with others to find a best practice.

There have been many times in the Drupal 7 and 8 development cycle where we have hit a problem that did not yet have an established best practice. We engaged with the community and put forward a model for other open-source libraries to leverage and improve upon.

Because the web is an ecosystem, it is essential to have a critical mass of sites adopting a particular solution in order to have leverage with the browsers and assistive technology. As interfaces become more complex, having standardized patterns will be important for the users, so that they can know how to interact with them.

Organizations with a mandate to support people with disabilities should be doing more to engage with open source communities. Both by fixing problems upstream and developing common patterns, everyone will benefit.

By attending this presentation understand why engaging with open-source communities will help make your site more accessible.