Plone and the Dutch web guidelines - Thijs Jonkman (plone gebruikersdagen 2008)¶

Thijs Jonkman (pareto) talks about the Dutch web content guidelines. Disability law suites caused several web content accessibility guidelines to spring to live, like WCAG and section 508 in the USA.

A core requirement is that content is available fully in semantic html code. So it should be viewable without javascript and without css. So use a h1 for your main headings instead of a span with some css class.

In the Netherlands, the generic guidelines are made even more stringent on www.webrichtlijnen.nl . Some advantages are quicker websites (less html code needed); future-safe as they're also better viewable on mobile devices; etc.

Plone out-of-the-box complies with wcag and section 508. But not the Dutch guidelines. There are just a few changes that have to be made, though. The points where plone doesn't comply:

• Plone uses xhtml transitional, but strict is required.
• Tables aren't allowed for layout. Plone uses it for the main column layout.
• The html content should be in the order of importance, plone places navigation first instead.
• All accessibility attributes should be usable, but kupu filters out some of them. Also things like the abbr tag should be easily usable from within kupu.

Tip: check your content on www.webrichtlijnen.nl if you're developing a Dutch website. Thijs did it for the plone.org website, which got a 33 out of 47 score. A tip from the audience: the accessibar firefox extension for checking loads of accessibility features.

So: a few small changes make plone ideal for making websites that comply with the webrichtlijnen.