Accessibility of EE’s control panel

Question

Do you have any experience with partial sighted or blind people using the EE control panel?

I'm very interested to know if there are any issues which might affect visually-impaired people when using ExpressionEngine. Thank you!

Answer 1

We had a partially blind user for a client that had control panel access, primarily under ExpressionEngine 1, but a little with EE 2. We heard no complaints.

Now understand, I can't tell you how well, the Control Panel worked for him. I can just state, of the products we needed to make adjustments to for him, ExpressionEngine wasn't one of them. I just looked up publishing stats for him, and he published 243 items into the system which consisted mostly of either long newsletters or short headline news briefs.

Now there were products, outside of ExpressionEngine that we had to adapt for him. FileMaker Pro (FMP) being one of them. The desktop experience with FMP was not friendly for people with limited vision, but any database or data table could be made available on the web, and that was fully accessible for the visually impaired. We made the news and donor database web accessible for him.

Our experience with him and ExpressionEngine was pretty much, we provided our Quick Introduction Guide to the client's system as a PDF, then scheduled a telephone walk through, which is standard. He asked about a PC compatibility text editor, since the client was 98% Mac OS-based, but he wanted to continue using his pre-configured machine which was a Window's based laptop. Then, we never heard from him again, unless it was things like, 'I just published the January Newsletter and the photo from this event isn't displaying correctly.'

I wish I could say more, but since he never seemed to have any problems, we never had time to interact with him around what's using EE like for the visual impaired. But at 243 posts, he used the system pretty frequently while he was on staff.