Hi everyone,

After introducing our goals and objectives for Liferay 6 regarding accessibility, I just wanted to highlight some of the improvements we have done lately. There have been a lot of people involved (Juan, Sergio, Eduardo, Nate, Jorge, Brian,...), so I won't detail what everyone did, but just go through some of the most interesting improvements:

• Alloy UI Forms. Alloy UI is an amazing framework for building web applications. Alloy Forms are a set of taglibs that generate secure, accessible and consistent forms. They are also integrated with localization, service builder and many other cool features. Today we can say that around 90% of Liferay forms are now converted to Alloy Forms. Some of the accessibility improvements provided by them are:
  • Explicit labels automatically handled for all the input fields (some assistive technologies do not correctly handle implicit labels)
  • Accessible help messages for any field
  • Warning the user if the context changes when changing the value of a field
  • Correct Html markup (not tables anymore :)
  • ...
• Html validation. Yes! we did it! Liferay 6 validates by default HTML 5 and it  also validates XHTML 1.0 if you change the doctype of your pages and add the xmlns attribute. 
• CKEditor. This is a great improvement! this editor is the latest version of fckEditor which brings a lot of accessibility improvements (keyboard navigation, tested in the screenreader JAWS...)
• ReCaptcha. (Contributed by Boubker TAGNAOUTI) Captchas are those images with some distorted text inside in which you have to find out the text to demonstrate you are not a machine but a person. The problem is that they are usually based on an image that you can see, so these mechanisms are not valid for blind users. Recaptcha adds an audible alternative for all those users who can't see the image or find it difficult to understand.

And this is just the beginning... keep tuned for the next episode in our way to WCAG 2.0!

See you soon!