I Appeared in the Accessibility and Plone Session at World Plone Day 2024
World Plone Day, an event held simultaneously around the world, took place on April 17. Plone is a CMS built with Python and has more than 20 years of history. I joined the "Accessibility and Plone" session, streamed from Japan at 8 p.m. Japan time.
The "Accessibility and Plone" session featured the team responsible for building the Telephone Relay Service official website. We spent an hour talking together, including topics specific to Plone.
As stated in the site's web accessibility policy, it conforms to conformance level AA. For accessibility-related work, we received tremendous help from Mr. Nishimoto of Shuaruta and Mr. Yamaga.
Personally, I think one highlight of the site we built is the video player, which includes sign language videos and text explanations. Here is one page as an example.
With this kind of content, we are also taking on the following success criteria as goals.
- 1.2.6 Sign Language (Prerecorded)
- 1.2.7 Extended Audio Description (Prerecorded)
- 1.2.8 Media Alternative (Prerecorded)
I was responsible for design, the base HTML, static parts, and various build-related HTML pieces for Plone. The design was done in Figma, and the color scheme was checked using Colour Contrast Analyzer. As I mention in the video, although I have built many sites before, this was my first experience with AA conformance including accessibility testing. There were cases where something should have been built correctly but was not read by VoiceOver, so I learned a great deal.
At the A11y session of Next Web Conference 2023, I said it felt like "a year when accessibility was calling me." One of the reasons was my involvement in building this site.
In Japan, there are many people involved in various accessibility-related movements, and thanks to their passionate activities, I personally feel that the momentum toward requiring accessibility support is growing.
I plan to continue working on accessibility. In particular, for the rich UI work that is my main area, I want to put more effort into accessibility going forward as well. If there are projects like that, please feel free to involve me.
By the way, the full World Plone Day 2024 playlist is below. If you are interested, sessions from other countries are likely in English, so please take a look.