It’s been a while since I attended a local event in person, and it was the same for a lot of the other attendees. I used to go to the DC and suburban Maryland meetups fairly frequently, and I have attended many Drupal GovCons in the past. So it was great to see folks in person again and catch up with people, both on a personal level and talking to folks about what kind of work they are doing now.
The first item was a short intro from Tim Doyle, current CEO of the Drupal Association. It was interesting to hear about the current status, especially since the D.A. is so deeply affected by the changes the pandemic has brought to the tech event scene. The project as a whole is adapting to
The first session I attended was by Mike Gifford of Civic Actions. He was discussing some tools to aid content editors in making their content accessible. While content editors may be informed in general about WCAG requirements, it never hurts to have assistance to support users in the scannable types of issues. Here’s some of the tools:
- https://accessibilityinsights.io/ This is a tool from Microsoft that allows for similar scans to WAVE toolbar, Lighthouse, etc. These types of tools are very useful during development or when doing a site audit. They can of course be used to check important pages when doing day to day work but requires the users to be aware of how to use them and remember to actually do so. One thing that stand out here in contrast to WAVE is the “visual helper” and checklists for keyboard accessibility testing, which is more complex to check than things like color contrast or the presence of alt text. It looks like there are also tools for testing desktop apps and mobile apps, so this seems like it could be a great addition to your testing arsenal.
- Editora11y: available as a Drupal module, this shows editors issues that they can address, right on the page that they are looking at. This covers similar ground as using a tool such as WAVE or Accessibility Insights, without the user having to remember to run those checks. So it's more likely that those issues will be noticed and acted on. I am intrigued by this one and planning to see if it will be helpful on my current project.
The second session was on storybook and layout builder. This was by Chris O'Donnell of Portage CyberTech. StorybookJS is a very widely used pattern library, and layout builder is the core Drupal layout paradigm. I have worked with both on previous projects. StorybookJS is an excellent tool, in a similar space to Pattern Lab or KSS node that a lot of Drupal themes have integrated, to represent what modular layout system is being used. Layout builder uses Drupal’s layout discovery system and inline block entities.
During the question and answer session I was interested that a number of teams restrict layout builder to only admin users/site builders and don’t see it as a general editor tool. This is in contrast to something like Layout Paragraphs or Gutenberg which are definitely targeting editor users, and the editor can use whichever components have been set up. Layout Builder definitely has the capability to be used in a similar fashion to Layout Paragraphs (per node control over what custom blocks are showing on the page). From experience it requires a bit of custom work to make Layout Builder as user friendly as one of those systems, since it can expose quite a lot of blocks out of the box, and a lot of the ‘fixes’ for that are in the contrib space.
The final session I attended was John Doyle’s session on Decoupled Drupal which presented a very lively discussion in the QA, around similar topics to the Layout Builder session. I think there are a lot of similar issues in page layout whether you are choosing to decouple or not. How much freedom are you giving content editors to change things, and what kind of dependencies between the front end rendering and your page building paradigms are you comfortable with.
Overall it was a great experience to be back in person to connect and learn with the community. I am looking forward to DrupalCon Pittsburgh in June!