Mike Gifford is a Senior Strategist at CivicActions and a thought leader on digital accessibility in the public sector.
Previously, he was the Founder and President of OpenConcept Consulting Inc., a web development agency specializing in building open source solutions for the open web. OpenConcept was an impact driven company and Certified B Corporation. Like CivicActions, OpenConcept worked extensively with the Drupal CMS. Mike was also part of the Government of Canada's Open Source Advisory Board.
Mike spearheaded accessibility improvements in Drupal since 2008, and officially became a Drupal Core Accessibility Maintainer in 2012.
As a long-term environmentalist, Mike has found ways to integrate his passions for the web and the planet. His most significant contributions have been in the development of the Sustainable Web Manifesto and adding an open source perspective to Tim Frick’s book Designing for Sustainability.
Authored Comments
I have heard that before but not tried it. Thanks!
Thanks for your comment. I'd like to acknowledge that I made a big claim in calling Drupal 7 the most accessible open source CMS. I don't believe that there have been any unbiased studies on the matter that have addressed even the most popular CMS's out there let alone. It would be great if there were an independent audit to cite or even an agreed to scoring mechanism to judge them.
Plone certainly had an early advantage and has been a well structured system. I really don't think that it's regarded as a leader in accessibility these days. I could be wrong, and I'm definitely biased.
In reviewing a couple demo sites I noticed some big accessibility problems for keyboard only users. This is only one type of disability, but I was just doing a pretty brief scan.
You can't put many details in a 1000 word article. I've posted a more detailed description of improvements to Drupal 8.