Accessibility and CMS

[Rebekka Kinimond Carlson]

Our library webpage runs on a CMS that is, to put it mildly, not really accessible (DynamicsWeb). It's all tables, all the time. I am looking into alternatives and so far it seems as if most of the availible CMS suffer from similiar issues.

Do any of you have any positive experiences with CMS you could share?

[Jeff Scott]

Try this link, http://cmsmatrix.org

It has a review of every Content Management Service available. I found it off of this blog
http://labyrinths.wordpress.com/2007/04/18/morgan-gao-using-a-cms-t...

Very cool stuff. Everyone likes Drupal though.

[Rebekka Kinimond Carlson]

That is a quite impressive site. Good thing I like researching technology ;)

[Steve Watkins]

Last summer we migrated most of our library website onto the campus' commercial CMS (from Ingeniux, see the listing on the website that Jeff provided) and it has worked out pretty well for us, although it's probably too expensive for a library site alone. It's entirely XML and XSLT-based, generating XHTML output that can be combined with CSS style sheets, which means that you can design the main templates in accessible ways and they'll then be applied to an entire site's web pages. Because of this approach, some 16,000 campus web pages are essentially made compliant with accessibility standards through the editing of a handful of XSLT pages and the accompanying style sheets. However, this adherence to a couple of standard templates means that we don't have access to a lot of other features we'd like, including blogs and RSS-generated content blocks, and we still maintain some dynamically-generated content on our own library server as well.

I don't know about Drupal's underlying layout enough to know whether it's easy to make it compliant or not, but others on this forum are quite expert with Drupal and can hopefully respond. I have experimented a bit with Joomla, which also uses some tables, but also CSS, and I just ran an accessibility checker against my test site's home page and it passed the top level of automatic verification, so you may want to give Joomla a look as well at http://joomla.org

Good luck, and I'm sure that the forum would love to hear which CMS you end up selecting.

--Steve

[Dominique Papin]

I haven't worked with many CMS, but the one i use for a (very small) site is CMS made simple. The structure of the pages is really nice, you can even navigate with stylesheets off.
I don't know what type of CMS you're looking for or the complexity needed for your site, but you should check out the site OpenSourceCMS. It lets you try demos of a lot of different CMS (and other server-side applications) without having to install them yourself.

[brinxmat]

I've used (or better yet, "been hampered by") four commercial systems. Two on Domino, two on Oracle, and in my experience the short answer is no, but that isn't to say that they couldn't have been made compliant with certain standards. Three things would ensure that any CMS produced accessible content:

* The templates
* A validator (that also checks accessibility issues)
* The actual content

The templates (as pointed out by steve Watkins) need to be well formed, a validator ensures that any problem structures are highlighted, and an eye on actual content never goes amiss.

I find that the majority of our customers have different accessiblity issues (generally cognitive) than those typically supported by the accessibilty templates. This means worrying about information design more than anything else.

Thus, CMSs can provide content that is basically compliant, and I suppose that tinkering with the templates, and extreme vigilance on the part of editors would provide totally compliant content. A good validator would help the editors isolate issues.

Link: http://ncdae.org/tools/factsheets/cms.cfm (Includes a list of CMSs).