Shaun, I consider your comments very insightful. I agree that doing anything to jeopardize the overall success of the project is foolish.

I want to make a clarification. I am not at all concerned with 508 or WCAG or WAI for the release of 097. I think that at this point we have likely agreed that due to contexts that an accessible manager or anyother manager interface for that matter is mutually exclusive and needn’t be related to the 097 release.

I just wanted to start a dialogue to ensure that accessibility and user ability gets a dot on the roadmap or a sideroad on the roadmap and to determine where, when, how and by whom an accessible interface exists.

Looking at statistics there are more than 30, 000, 000 (nearly 10%) people in the US alone with varying levels of ability or who use alternative interaction tools that rely on certain elements in the browser for interaction.

In addition I want to make a clarification that 508 and WCAG and WAI are specifications and should be considered a guide but the aim should be to allow users to use the application in most cases.

What I envision is that an accessibility project be a MODx project that will at some time offer either an accessibile interface addon or provide some guidance to those who wish to make 097 so. (since is should be possible for anyone who understands 097, the api and the model.)

At this time I think it would be a positive step to just acknowledge accessibility as a project consideration and therefore showing intent and not promise any deliverable or timeline. If, it is the goal of MODx to become one of the top-3 CMS/F applications we will need to get into the enterprise removing reasons to limit accepatance by enterprise and small government should be a step in that direction.

To conclude, I am just asking to put a dot on the map and to show that a future MODx will be able to be fully accessible.

So I guess that accessiblity is not the only factor. There are various considerations and I want to make sure that we are looking at all aspects of the UI that ships with 097 to ensure the greatest uptake and least resistance from those who wish to deploy it. It won’t be necessary to ship all forms with the release bundle but be at least able to deliver a simple solution for common user scenarios that deviate from the JS enabled/Latest Browser scenario.

...this would be an optional replacement for the standard Manager.

This accessibility project needs to become an official MODx Core Extension project so that whoever is involved in the development can work closely with the core team to make this happen with unwanted compromises. There will likely be spots that need refactoring in the core to make the integration work 100% but doing this is what will make it possible and desirable for other developers to attempt similar projects on their own.

I just don’t think we’d ever keep the power-user happy with such an interface and likely spend most of our lives trying to make a decent 508-compliant interface that presented a rich-experience and degraded properly based on the client device.

BTW, this is something we will be dealing with post-release, because I do not want to hold up the release of the 0.9.7 core framework and default manager interface any more than it already has been.