Many people ask us frequently, is liferay accessible? Does it validate level AA of [FILL_WITH_YOUR_ACCESSIBILITY_STANDARD_HERE]? (It could be WCAG1.0, WCAG2.0, Section 508, RGAA...) And it is not easy to answer, because Liferay usually is just the tool for building your websites, and even though Liferay will help you to achieve any accessibility certification, the final responsibility will be yours. The theme you use or the content you are creating will be the main responsible for the accessibility of your website. We have started a wiki page with some accessibility guidelines to help you with this responsibility. This page will grow with time, feel free to contribute your ideas or lessons learnt when building portals with Liferay.

We keep improving the accessibility of the portal itself (I will make a post with all the improvements coming for 6.1 soon) and we are trying to fix any accessibility issue that any user may find. If you have found accessibility issues, please let us know in the accessibility forums and we will fix them as soon as possible. (We are open to contributions too).

So, in order to prove that it is possible (and even easy!) to create accessible websites using Liferay, we have started a wiki page to display a list of Accessible Websites built with Liferay that have an accessibility certification. Feel free to add your website to the list if you have an accessibility certification or let us know and we will add it for you. There are websites validating WCAG1.0, WCAG2.0 or RGAA... 

By the way, have you checked out the Accessibility Portlets contributed by our community member Boubker? Cool stuff...

(See English version below)

En octubre se celebrará en Málaga (España) el Open Source World Conference, una de las conferencias más importantes en materia de software libre a nivel europeo. Desde Liferay hay un gran interés en la conferencia, tanto por el nivel de las ponencias que mucha gente está presentado como por las ponencias que nosotros mismos podríamos presentar si finalmente son aceptadas.

Desde la oficina de Liferay España hemos presentado las siguientes ponencias, si os parecen interesantes podéis votar por ellas y así habrá más posibilidades de que finalmente las presentemos:

• Cómo ahorrar siguiendo buenas prácticas en Liferay
• Desarrollo rápido de portlets MVC
• Hooks: personalizando Liferay sin parar el servidor
• Creación de portales e intranets empresariales con Liferay Portal, ¡en vivo!
• Evolución de modelos de negocio con Software Libre: la experiencia de Liferay en España 
• Optimización del rendimiento y alta disponibilidad en aplicaciones Java complejas usando herramientas Open Source
• Ecuaciones sociales: midiendo la participación de los usuarios

Un saludo!

______________________________________________________

 In Octobre, the Open Source World Conference will be held in Malaga (Spain). The OSWC is one of the most important conferences in Europe about Open Source. In Liferay we are very interested in the conference since there may be many interesting talks and also because we may present our own talks. From the Spanish office, we have submitted the following proposals, if you find them interesting you can vote for them in the OSWC site, so that we are more likely to finally talk in the conference.:

• How to save money following good practices with Liferay
• Rapid MVC portlet devlopment
• Hooks: customizing liferay without stopping the server
• Creation of business portals and intranets using Liferay Portal, Life!
• Evolution of Open source business models: Liferay experience in Spain
• Performance and High availability tuning in complex Java Applications using Open Source tooling
• Social Equity: measure the participation of your users

Cheers!

Yes, you can! We have seen lately many people asking about this in the forums and several projects.

Liferay 5.2 uses uses jQuery 1.2.6. and many people wonder if they can use a different version for their plugins or themes. The answer is yes :)

If you are using Liferay 6, the portal uses Alloy UI instead of jQuery, which means that you can use whatever version of jQuery you need for your custom developments.

If you are using Liferay 5.2.x, you may have noticed that Liferay uses jQuery 1.2.6. Upgrading liferay to use a new library may be hard. New versions of jQuery are not backwards compatible and several features (such as drag and drop) may break.

However, a nice solution is to keep liferay using jQuery 1.2.6 and make your custom portlets or themes use a newer version if needed. This can be easily done using the method jQuery.noConflict(); .

We have created a wiki page called Several jQuery versions within Liferay which will help you to understand more technical details. Feel free to add more examples about it!

See you soon!

Edited: Please, read the wiki page for the latest details about this. For example, in several versions of jQuery, this will only work if you do jQuery.noConflict(true) instead of jQuery.noConflict()

 Hi Everyone, 

it's been more than a month since episode 1 about accessibility improvements. It's not because we didn't have anything to tell, it's just because we didn't have time to do it...  but there have been a lot more of accessibility improvements and most of them are already available in the Liferay 6 RC.

• "Skip to content" link. This link appears now at the top of all our pages in the classic theme and the control panel. This link allows the users to skip the navigation and go directly to the content of the page.
• Keyboard navigation and ARIA support for liferay menus. All the button menus in liferay are built using the <liferay-ui:menu> taglib. Right now we have followed the ARIA standard, so that you can open the menu pressing enter and then navigate through the items using the up/down arrows. To close the menu you can either press scape or press tab. We have tested this improvements with JAWS and the result was really satisfactory, using ARIA roles allows JAWS to tell the user: "This is a menu button, press enter to open the menu and use up/down arrows to navigate through the items" and once it is open it says "Item 1 out of 7 Edit, Item 2 out of 7 Permissions, Item 3 out of 7 RSS.. " and so on.
  
• Icons taglib in liferay. Most of the icons in liferay which are followed by some text are built using the <liferay-ui:icon> taglib and this taglib generated two links: one for the image and one for the text, which could be very confusing for people using screenreaders as they would listen to every link twice. We have fixed it so that there is only one link and the alternative text for the image is "" when there is complementary text (as it is only decorative).
  
• Providing more information in links. Asset publisher and other portlets have been improved to provide more information in all of their links. For example, originally, all the text was "edit", "print" or "pdf" (as the rest of the infomation pointing to the resource is visual) and some users may have problems with these links. Now, the html text includes the name of the resource, althought is is not visible using a normal browser. The text is something like "Edit article one" or "print report on schools".
  
• Language information. Screenreaders need to know the language of the content they are reading. We have added the language in the W3C standard at the top of every page.

  <!DOCTYPE html>
  <html lang="fr"> 
  <head>
    <title>document écrit en français</title>

  We have also added the language attribute to all those places in which we are using different languages (for example, the language selectors).

  <select>
   <option lang="ar-SA"value="ar_SA"> العربية(السعودية) </option>
   <option lang="eu-ES" value="eu_ES"> Basque (Spain)</option>
   <option lang="bg-BG" value="bg_BG">български(България)</option>
   <option lang="ca-AD" value="ca_AD"> català (Andorra) </option>
   <option lang="ca-ES" value="ca_ES"> català (Espanya) </option>
   <option lang="zh-CN" value="zh_CN"> 中文 (中国) </option>
   <option lang="zh-TW" value="zh_TW"> 中文 (台灣) </option>
  </select>
      

• Accessible ratings. Ratings in liferay (stars and thumbs) are built using the taglib. This component is very difficult to use for some users as all the information there is visual, it is based in the color of the stars. This component has been modified, so that users with screenreaders to use this component easily as the html for the stars is as follows.
  
• Opens in a new window link. Links that open a new window of the browser now notify the user about it. The text can be changed for an image using css, as it is all wrapped by a span with the class "opens-new-window-accessible".
         

As always, more info in this wiki page... And there are even more but this blog entry is starting to become too long, so I will keep them for the next episode, keep tuned! see you soon!

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!