Personalization and Building an Accessible Site
Channel: Drupal North
Date: 14/06/2019

Mike Gifford

As Dries just outlined in his article Adding support for Dark Mode to web applications, we are going to have to spend more time thinking about user preferences. People are discussing adoption of new CSS media query like prefers-color-scheme or prefers-reduced-motion into our designs. These are just some of the preferences that people could start using in their designs.

We recently began adding a Preferences Framework that allows users to specify a great many things about how content is presented. Font size, color schemes, line spacing, font, even a table of contents. This gives users many ways to make your content more consumable.

The web is evolving where people want to be able to identify their preferences for content. They also want that preference follow them around on the web. Many accessibility experts are now focusing on an accessible core theme that allows users to change to meet their individual needs. Sadly there is no single solution which provides universal accessibility.

This will be a high-level presentation, but having some knowledge of CSS will be useful.

Attendees will be able to walk away with:

Strategies for dealing with prefers-color-scheme and prefers-reduced-motion designs
More information about the Drupal implementation of the Fluid UI's Preferences Framework
A better sense of how different user needs can often conflict with each other

Mike Gifford
Founder & CEO, Ottawa, @mgifford
Mike Gifford is the Founder and President of OpenConcept Consulting Inc., a web development agency specializing in the Drupal CMS. OpenConcept is a Certified B Corporation (B Corp) and works ensure that we have a positive impact on the our clients, our people, our community and the world that we live in. The company has nearly 20 years of experience in developing open source solutions that are secure, scalable, inclusive and sustainable. 

Pushed by a desire to build better and more inclusive software, Mike has been involved with accessibility since the beginning of the 90s. He has spearheaded accessibility improvements in Drupal since 2008, and officially became a Drupal Core Accessibility Maintainer in 2012. Mike also wrote a Drupal Security Best Practices to highlight approaches some of the best practices in securing your site.  Mike is a co-founder of Civic Tech Ottawa, a community of inviduals who are working for more open and engaged participation between citizens and governments.  Using innovative technology, policy and design solutions, citizens can work with their governments to help better shape their communities. He has been been involved in engaging with federal, provincial and municipal governments to adopt more open source, and open standards approaches and encourage broader understanding of open government.

https://drupalnorth.org/en/session/personalization-and-building-accessible-site