Welcome to the eighty-fourth episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
Episode
Listen to the eighty-fourth episode of the Access On podcast (Browser).
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Timestamps
This week, we continue our series on creating websites, with a look at two of the most popular content management systems.
- WordPress 0:00:00
- Drupal 0:38:45
- Closing and contact info 1:08:40
Transcript
MUSIC:
Live like you want.
Access On.
Jonathan Mosen:
Welcome to Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. This week it's part two of our series on tools and techniques for creating your own website.
Well, we've done plenty of scene-setting and now we're getting into the specifics and we're going to have a look at a couple of content management systems in depth. The first is WordPress. And as Julie Andrews might say, that's a very good place to start, because WordPress powers somewhere around 42% of all websites on the internet. The very first thing that confuses people when they hear about WordPress is that there are two distinct things called WordPress. WordPress.org is the open source software project. You download the software for free, install it on a web server that you rent or that you own, and you're in control of everything. You choose your hosting company, you install your own themes and plugins. You are responsible for updates and security. This version gives you the most flexibility and it's what most serious sites use.
Wordpress.com is a hosted service. It's run by the company called Automattic. That's Automattic with two Ts, by the way. They handle the servers, the updates, and a lot of the technical details for you. There's a free tier and several paid tiers. The trade-off is that you do have less control. On lower-plan tiers, they restrict your choice of themes and plugins. The free plan even places advertising on your site that you can't remove, so you get what you pay for. For most people who want serious control of their web presence, wordpress.org installed on your own hosting account is the standard recommendation and that's what I'm going to be focusing on today.
Now to run wordpress.org, you need two things. You've got to have a domain name and a hosting account. A domain name is your address on the web, something like nfb.org or yourname.com. You register a domain through a domain registrar and this typically costs somewhere between 10 and 20 dollars per year. You can now get all kinds of suffixes and some of them are actually quite expensive and there are some really funky suffixes out there now. You might find that if you are hosting a website with a particular company, that they will also handle the domain name registration for you, or you can use a dedicated domain name registrar if you prefer.
Web hosting is the service that actually stores your website files and serves them to visitors. Hosting companies rent you space on a server. For a basic WordPress site, shared hosting typically costs somewhere between three and 15 dollars per month depending on the provider and the plan. The good news is that most major hosting providers now offer one-click WordPress installation. So if you go for a company like that, setting it up doesn't require any technical expertise at all. You literally choose a link, it goes away and installs the software for you and set it up with some defaults, and then you can log in and do the configuration. It really is straightforward. Companies like Bluehost, SiteGround, WP Engine, and DreamHost all do this. The control panels that these companies provide vary in screen reader accessibility, which is worth researching before you commit to something. You might look at blindness community forums for recent experiences with specific hosts. In my experience, the best place to get good quality technical advice in a blindness context is Mastodon on social media. A lot of tech-savvy blind people are hanging out on Mastodon. I'm part of a Mastodon instance called caneandable.social and you're welcome to sign up there if you'd like to.
Don't rely on old information about web hosts because it does change all the time. For example, I've been with DreamHost since 2013 and they used to be very popular in the blind community, but accessibility has really deteriorated of late. Once you've installed WordPress, you can access it by going to yoursite.com or whatever the domain name is that you paid for /wp-admin. That is a consistent way to log into WordPress. Go to the domain name and then append /wp-admin to the URL. Once you're there, you'll be presented with a login form and you can log in with the username and password that you set up during installation. You want to be very careful about this password because obviously if someone has it, they can log in and do all sorts of damage. Use a unique, complex password and store it in a password manager like 1Password.
What you land on is called the dashboard. Now, the WordPress dashboard is a web interface and you navigate it with your browser and your screen reader just as you would any other website. I use WordPress on several sites I maintain, one of which is the Mosen At Large website and I just happen to have that dashboard up on the screen at the moment. So if I perform a window title ...
Screen reader:
Dashboard < Mosen at Large M-WordPress. Personal Microsoft Edge.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'm at the top of the page. And if I down-arrow, we can see that there is quite a bit here.
Screen reader:
Same page. Link, skip to main content. Same page. Link, skip to toolbar. Link, dashboard. Link, current page home. Link, updates 14. Link, as pop-up menu Jetpack. Link, my Jetpack. Link, stats. Link, Akismet Anti-spam.
Jonathan Mosen:
There's a lot here. We won't go through the whole thing, but as you can see, there are plugins, there are various features here. It allows you to take a look at your site, see what needs updating, if anything. And it also allows you to expand your site with the use of plugins, which is something I'll talk about later. If I navigate by heading here ...
Screen reader:
Dashboard heading level one. To get missing image descriptions, open the context menu. Unlabeled graphic. Heading level three, MP3 player by Sonaar.
Jonathan Mosen:
So we've got that here as well.
Screen reader:
WPForms. Heading level two. View all form entries inside the WordPress dashboard heading level two.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'm just navigating by heading to get to different parts of this page. From here, I can also create a new post or create a new page, and I'll explain the difference between pages and posts in just a little bit. So this is where it all happens and it's a relatively friendly experience. Like everything, there's a learning curve because it's new and it's unfamiliar, but it's pretty easy to get your head around if you're willing to do some reading and study up on how WordPress works.
WordPress has a robust comments system and you'd come in here to the dashboard to take a look at comments if you've left them open, either on blog posts or pages. You can elect whether to have comments open on every specific page. You can set a default and then overwrite whatever that default is as the need arises. And you'll notice that even in that cursory look at the dashboard, you heard about Akismet Anti-spam. That's pretty essential because if you get a blog that's remotely popular, you are going to be inundated by horrible comment spam and Akismet does a pretty good job of dealing with that so that you never even have to see it. Some very big websites use WordPress. This is heavy-duty stuff. The White House uses WordPress. CNN uses WordPress and various other media conglomerates use it. So in that situation, you do need to support multiple users and you can manage those users here and there is a settings screen as well.
Each of these items has a sub-menu that expands when you interact with it. When you go to write a post or a page in WordPress, you'll encounter an editor. Now there are two fundamentally different editors and their accessibility profiles are quite different as well. The original WordPress editor, now commonly called the classic editor, was a standard rich text editing area. It's a simplified version, if you will, of the kind of thing you'd find in a Word processor. You had a toolbar at the top with formatting buttons, all of which had hot keys attached to them. There was a title field and a large text area where you typed content. You could use it entirely with your keyboard.
Screen reader users could navigate and use it reasonably effectively. Many blind users developed solid workflows around the classic editor over many years. It was familiar. It was keyboard-navigable. And while it had some quirks, those quirks were well understood. WordPress officially replaced the classic editor back in 2018 with a new editing system called Gutenberg, which I'll get to in a moment. A plugin called simply the Classic Editor plugin restores the original editing interface. It's an official plugin maintained by the WordPress team and it's currently supported through at least 2026.
But a word of caution, it was never designed to be a permanent solution, just a transitional tool to give people time to move toward Gutenberg. Now, the WordPress team has extended its support deadline multiple times as demand remained high, so the pattern suggests continued extensions might be possible, but there is no firm commitment beyond 2026 at this point. It had over five million active installations when I last checked and that tells you something about how many people still prefer the older interface. For blind users who want a straightforward accessible writing experience and aren't interested in wrestling with a complex new interface, installing that WordPress classic editor plugin is a practical and widely used approach. I'm still using it myself. You install the plugin, activate it, and your editor reverts to the familiar layout.
I'll talk more about installing plugins a little bit later, but let's first talk about the Gutenberg block editor. It was introduced into WordPress 5.0 and it takes a fundamentally different approach to content creation. Instead of one continuous text area, everything on the page is a block. A paragraph is a block, a heading is a block, an image is a block, a button is a block. And you add blocks, rearrange them, configure their individual settings, and assemble a page from these components. From a visual design point of view, blocks offer a lot of flexibility. You can build complex page layouts without knowing any code.
From a screen reader standpoint, Gutenberg has had a complicated history. When it was first introduced, the accessibility community, including the NFB and many screen reader users, raised significant concerns. The editor was difficult to navigate, it had numerous unlabeled controls, and the workflow for adding and managing blocks wasn't intuitive for keyboard-only users. There was a substantial period where using Gutenberg with a screen reader was genuinely frustrating.
The good news is that the situation has somewhat improved since then. The WordPress Accessibility Team has done real work on Gutenberg over the years and each major release tends to bring improvements. Gutenberg is now more usable with the screen reader than it was when it launched. That said, it remains more complex than the classic editor and the accessibility experience can vary depending on which blocks you use and which version of WordPress you're running. Some themes and some hosting environments are moving toward requiring Gutenberg for certain features, particularly around full sight editing. So it is worth knowing a few practical strategies. First, WordPress provides a keyboard shortcut to insert a new block, the forward-slash key, which brings up a block search. You type the name of the block you want, navigate the results, and press enter to insert it.
Second, once you're inside a block and you're typing text, that text area behaves more like a standard edit field. The accessibility problems in Gutenberg are mostly around the interface of managing blocks, not actually around typing text within them. Third, checking the WordPress accessibility team's blog and blindness community forums for current notes on screen reader support is useful because the experience does change between versions. My overall recommendation for people just getting started is even though it might be tempting to work with the technology that's clearly the future, maybe save some pain and install the Classic Editor plugin in the first instance and build your skills from there. You can always explore Gutenberg later from a position of confidence rather than confusion.
One handy trick when working with WordPress is that you can compose material in Word and paste it into the classic editor. WordPress preserves heading levels, list structure, and bold text. This really helps because most of us work in Word a lot. So you take your document and a heading level marked as heading level two in Word becomes a heading level two in WordPress and HTML. A bulleted list in Word becomes a proper HTML list. Bold will remain bold. I point this out because this is not always the case with web editors and they often strip formatting when you paste, but WordPress does a good job of maintaining structure. That said, you can mark up headings and listen to all those things with keyboard shortcuts in WordPress itself and it doesn't do any harm at all to learn those and become familiar with it.
After you paste, use your screen reader to navigate the content by headings and confirm that the heading levels did transfer as you expected. I'm pretty confident that in most cases they will have. Occasionally a heading level will shift, though, during the paste process, and a quick review before you publish will catch any issues.
When you're getting started with WordPress, you've got some foundational questions to deal with. Choosing a theme for your WordPress site is an important foundational decision. It's not an irrevocable decision though. You can change your theme at any time. And what I often do when I'm looking at scoping a WordPress site is try a range of themes. I find one that looks accessible to me as a screen reader user and often I'll ask a trusted sighted person to give it a look from a visual standpoint. I usually rely on my daughter, Heidi, for this purpose who is an accessibility consultant, so that comes in handy. A WordPress theme controls how your site looks. It determines the visual layout, the colors, the topography, the position of navigation menus, whether there's a sidebar, what the header and footer contain, and overall visual design of your pages and posts.
The theme doesn't control your content. If you switch themes, your posts and your pages stay intact. So that's really handy. The only thing that changes is how they're presented to visitors. Themes are separate from WordPress itself. You install them from the WordPress theme directory, which you can get to on that dashboard that I just showed you. You can also purchase them from third party developers, in which case you're most likely to have to upload them, but that's a straightforward process. And you can also have a custom theme built. I'm sure these days that Claude and ChatGPT and those guys will build a WordPress theme for you. I've not tried this, but various coding tools are doing far more complex things than that.
There are thousands of themes available already though. When you're thinking about the accessibility of a theme, it's important to consider it from two perspectives. The first one is the accessibility for the people visiting your site. We put the customer first, right? So we think about them first. But of course, a really pretty theme that looks great to your visitors is no good if it's giving you trouble administering the website as the site owner. So you've got to take that into account as well because the theme can change that dashboard. It can change the way that you work with WordPress.
For visitor accessibility, you want a theme that uses proper heading structure, has good color contrast, provides visible keyboard focus indicators, and doesn't rely on mouse hover interactions for essential content. The WordPress theme directory includes an accessibility-ready tag that identifies themes which have been reviewed against a set of accessibility criteria. Filtering by tag is a reasonable starting point, though it doesn't guarantee perfect accessibility. For your own management accessibility, some themes have complex visual customizers that are difficult or impossible to use with a screen reader. Watch for themes that load a drag and drop page builder or a heavily JavaScript-driven customization interface. These can create real barriers for blind site owners.
Several themes have a solid reputation in the screen reader community. The recent default themes provided by WordPress itself have been built with accessibility as a consideration and are generally navigable. That said, you might want something a bit different, off the beaten path a little bit, just so that your site doesn't look generic and the same as many other sites. That said, these themes are free and if you're on a budget, that's a consideration as well. Themes expressly marketed as accessibility-ready and designed for nonprofits or content focused-sites include names like Neve, Astra and GeneratePress. These are popular, well maintained, and they have good reputations for clean code and accessibility features. Many have free versions and they offer paid upgrades for additional features. And you can find the WordPress accessibility-ready theme directory at wordpress.org/themes. And when you get there, you can filter with the accessibility-ready tag. That's the most current and comprehensive list.
I would be cautious about themes that rely heavily on mega menus with complex hover interactions, themes that use of Canvas navigation that's not keyboard-accessible, and themes bundled with page builders like Elementor or Divi as their primary customization method. That's because these often create difficult or unusable experiences for both screen reader users visiting your site and for you managing it. Searching for the theme name alongside terms like "screen reader" or "accessibility" or "JAWS" or "NVDA" or "blindness", anything like that, can also be a practical way to do the research. So that's themes.
Now let's talk about plugins. Plugins extend WordPress's functionality. They're kind of like apps for your website. The base WordPress installation is deliberately lean and plugins add features. If you want a contact form, there's a plugin for that. If you want to improve your site's performance and search engines, there's a plugin for that. If you're setting up a WordPress website because you want to sell product, you can get plenty of e-commerce platforms, obviously like apps. Some plugins are more accessible than others, so you might like to ask around or do a little bit of experimentation. There are numerous podcasting plugins, livingblindfully.com, which was my former podcast, ran on WordPress. That site is still up and we did a lot of work to make it a custom experience for podcasting. You can manage membership sites with WordPress plugins or display events all through plugins.
You can install plugins by uploading zip files. Sometimes if you're purchasing a plugin, you might be given a zip file that you upload, but there are also, last I checked, over 60,000 plugins in the official WordPress plugin store. So you're not going to be short of things to choose from to extend the functionality of your site. Installing a plugin from within WordPress is really straightforward. In the dashboard, you navigate to plugins and then add new, there is a search field there, and you type in what you're looking for, navigate the results. When you find the plugin you want, there's an "install now" button followed by an "activate" button. That process is generally screen reader-accessible. Let's demonstrate that now since we're at the dashboard and I'll just confirm my place here.
Screen reader:
Dashboard < Mosen at Large M-WordPress. Personal Microsoft Edge.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now I'm going to press the list of links hot key, which in most screen readers is your screen reader key plus F7.
Screen reader:
Link, list dialogue.
Jonathan Mosen:
And the best way to get there is to just type plug. And we've got
Screen reader:
Plugins, 170 of 207.
Jonathan Mosen:
So as you can hear, there are a lot of links on this dashboard. My dashboard is pretty busy. But now that I've found plugins, if I down-arrow from here in the links list ...
Screen reader:
Install plugins. Add new plugin, 72 of 207.
Jonathan Mosen:
I've got add new plugin and that's what I want, so I'll press enter.
Screen reader:
Add plugin < Mosen at Large M-WordPress. Add plug-in, single left point-
Jonathan Mosen:
All right, let's cut that off and I'm going to press the letter E to navigate to the edit field that has now revealed itself.
Screen reader:
Search plugins. Edit. Blank placeholder. Search plugins, dot, dot, dot. The search results will be updated as you type.
Jonathan Mosen:
As you can hear, there's a lot of work that's gone into the screen reader experience. Here, I'll press enter.
Screen reader:
Add plugin < Mosen at Large M-WordPress. Main region. Search plugins, edit, blank, placeholder. Search plugins, dot, dot, dot. The search results will be updated as you type. One password menu is available.
Jonathan Mosen:
All right. I got to type E-commerce into this field and now I'll press the tab key.
Screen reader:
Content info region. Word press link. Number of plugins found. 2,510.
Jonathan Mosen:
So just by typing in E-commerce, it came back with 2,510 results, which is a little bit daunting, but there's a lot here. And because I use the plugins directory quite frequently, I know now that if I navigate by heading level three, I'll get to each result.
Screen reader:
Add plugins, heading level one. MP3 Player by Sonaar. Filter plugins list. Heading level WP Optimize-Cache, Compress Images, Minify & Clean Database to Boost Page Speed and Performance, heading level three link.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'll keep pressing three and I think we will get to results that are more meaningful.
Screen reader:
Mercado Pago payments for WooCommerce, heading level three link.
Jonathan Mosen:
If I down-arrow here ...
Screen reader:
Install now button unavailable. Link, more information about Mercado Pago payments for WooCommerce 8.7.20. Offer to your clients the best experience in e-commerce by using Mercado Pago as your payment method.
Jonathan Mosen:
So as you can hear, it really is like the app store. You're getting a description of the plugin.
Screen reader:
Buy. Link, Mercado Pago. Additional plugins are required. WooCommerce. Link, more information about WooCommerce. 4.0 rating based on 688 ratings. Last updated five days ago. 100,000-plus active installations compatible with your version of WordPress. Heading level three. Link, calculator to 3D Compass checkout.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now what that demonstrates is that e-commerce is quite a broad search term and you are going to get a lot of results. So like everything, it's important to try and narrow down that search to type a search that's likely to yield the results that you want while not being so broad that it gives you this massive number of results like we've just got here. So you can have a lot of fun browsing the WordPress plugins or you can install plugins and then activate the plugin if you find that it's not doing what you would like. Maybe it's not accessible or the functionality's just not intuitive. Maybe it's not well documented. Any number of reasons you can deactivate the plugin and then uninstall it and no harm done. So what you would do is you'd go to that plugins link that we found before in our links list, but instead of choosing add new, you'll see an option called installed plugins and that shows you all the things that you have installed on your site, you deactivate and delete.
A few categories of plugins are commonly considered essential for any serious WordPress site. SEO plugins, search engine optimization plugins, help search engines understand your content. Yoast SEO, and that's spelled Y-O-A-S-T and then a new word S-E-O, and also Rank Math, the two most widely used. And when you have them up and running, they will add fields to your post and page editing screens that let you set the title and description that search engines display. Both are largely accessible, though their settings screens can be quite complex.
Contact form plugins let visitors send you messages. Contact Form 7 is a longstanding free option and WP Forms, which we have on the Mosen at Large website, has both free and paid versions with a more accessible form builder. So if you want to see that plugin in action, you can go to the Mosen at Large website and choose the contacts link and you'll see all the options that are there.
These sorts of plugins create forms that visitors fill out without needing to expose your email address on the site. If you do that, you will definitely see the amount of spam that you get increase substantially. Try, if you can, not to include email addresses in plain text on any website because once your email address gets in spam databases, it's really difficult to get it out.
Security plugins protect your site from login attacks and malware. And in this category, Word fence is the most widely used free option. It monitors your site and blocks suspicious activity. Let's talk about caching plugins because they can really help improve your site's loading speed by saving copies of your pages that serve faster. WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache are common free choices. WP Rocket is a well-regarded paid option in this category.
And then there are backup plugins, got to back it upright and they make copies of your site on a schedule. UpdraftPlus is the most widely installed free backup plugin. Having backups is not optional. It is fundamental. For podcasters, I know there are a few blind podcasters around, Seriously Simple Podcasting and PowerPress are popular choices that manage your podcast episodes and they'll generate RSS feeds compatible with Apple Podcast, Spotify and other platforms and embed audio players in your posts. For nonprofits and organizations, GiveWP handles donation processing. The Event Calendar manages event listings. BuddyPress can add community and membership features. For membership sites, MemberPress, Paid Membership Pro and Restrict Content Pro all provide ways to limit content to registered or paying members. So if you're seriously into content creation and you want to do this for a living and you have something that you think people will pay for, this is one way to handle that.
Before installing a plugin that you'll use regularly to manage your site, it's worth checking whether the plugin's own administrative interface is screen reader accessible. A few practical approaches here. Check the plugin support forum on wordpress.org for posts mentioning accessibility, screen reader, JAWS, or NVDA. Of course, if you're on the Mac side, you could check for Voiceover as well. If people have had problems, they often document them there. Check the plugin developer's website for any accessibility documentation or statements. You could also email the developer to see how responsive they are. You could ask in NFB or screen reader community forums whether anyone has used the plugin you're considering.
Accessibility-specific plugins that add features like alt text prompting, skip links, or ARIA attributes to your site include WP Accessibility by Joe Dolson. An accessibility specialist maintains this plugin and it's a widely recommended edition. It fixes several common accessibility gaps and themes in WordPress itself. Be cautious about plugins that claim to make your site automatically accessible through an overlay widget. They don't substitute for genuine accessible design, they sometimes interfere with screen readers, and they've been the subject of significant legal and advocacy scrutiny.
So you've got your theme, you've got your plugins installed. Let's talk about actually putting the content into this thing. WordPress has two main content types, pages and posts. Pages are for static content that doesn't change often and doesn't belong in a chronological stream. Your about page, your contact page, your services page, a mission statement page, that kind of thing. Pages exist outside of any category or tax system. They're typically linked from your main navigation menu.
Posts, on the other hand, have a content that is published regularly and fits into a reverse chronological stream, blog entries, news updates, podcast episodes. Posts can be assigned to categories and tags and they show up in your site's RSS feed. Visitors can subscribe to your post content through feed readers. Creating both works the same way in terms of screen reader interaction. So I'm on the dashboard and I'm going to bring that list of links back up.
Screen reader:
Link, list dialogue.
Jonathan Mosen:
And I'm going to go to posts by typing, say, POS.
Screen reader:
Post 16 of 282.
Jonathan Mosen:
If I down-arrow from there ...
Screen reader:
All posts, 17 of 282. Add new posts, 18 of 282.
Jonathan Mosen:
And that's all I have to do to start the process of adding a post to the blog on Mosen at Large. So I'll press enter.
Screen reader:
Add new post < Mosen at Large M-WordPress. Edit. One password menu is available. Press down arrow to select.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now I'm in an edit field.
Screen reader:
Add title edit.
Jonathan Mosen:
And impressively, WordPress has put focus in the edit field so all I have to do is to, well, depending on my screen reader, enable forms mode or disable browse mode, whatever you have to do to start typing on the web, and then I can type my title.
Screen reader:
Add title, edit. This is a test.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'll press tab.
Screen reader:
Main region, rich text area. Press alt-shift-H for help. Frame. Edit.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'm still using the Classic Editor and I'm in a rich edit field and I can just start to type my blog post. I can press tab again.
Screen reader:
Save draft button. Preview opens in the new tab link.
Jonathan Mosen:
This is a very handy feature. Before you save the post, you can press enter a new tab will open and you'll see the post as your audience would see it if you hit the publish button.
Screen reader:
Edit status button. Edit visibility button. Edit date and time button.
Jonathan Mosen:
So we can go through here. As you can hear, it's all very accessible. I'm just tabbing through this and getting great feedback about the choices that I have.
Let's talk about categories. Categories are the main organizational structure for posts, which is what we're creating now. They're broad groupings. A news site might have categories like national news, local events, and opinion. And believe me, there are plenty of news sites that you know that are powered by WordPress. You should assign at least one category to every post. If you don't assign one, WordPress places it in a default category called "Uncategorized", which you can rename. Tags are more specific descriptors. They're optional and they work like keywords. For example, a post about legislation currently being advocated for pertaining to self-driving vehicles might be categorized under advocacy but tagged with autonomous vehicles, legislation, and Maryland. Tags help visitors find related content. Both categories and tags appear as checkbox lists or text entry fields in the post-editing sidebar. With the classic editor, these are in the panel to the right of or below the main editing area. They are accessible with screen readers.
Now let's talk about adding media to your site. You might want to add audio clips or video clips. WordPress maintains a media library which stores all uploaded images, audio files, and other media. You access it through the media menu in the dashboard. When you upload an image, WordPress provides fields for the alt text, a title, a caption, and a description. The alt text field is the most important for accessibility. It's what screen readers announce when a visitor encounters the image. WordPress surfaces this field in the media upload dialogue and in the attachment detail screen. You can navigate to it with standard form navigation in your screen reader.
One practical note, WordPress doesn't require you to fill in the alt text before uploading. It would be great if it did. It is entirely possible to upload images and leave the alt text blank, which produces inaccessible results for your visitors and for you when you review your own site. Making a habit of always filling in the alt text field before inserting an image is important, both for your visitors who use screen readers and for general good practice in web publishing. For audio files, particularly podcast episodes, WordPress stores them in a media library and provides a URL you can reference in your posts.
If you're setting up a single user site, then your account may be all you need, but if you have big aspirations and you want multiple people to work with you on the site, WordPress is up to this task. It has a built-in system for managing multiple contributors, which matters if you run a site with a team. The main user roles are administrator, which will be you if you're setting up the site. It has complete control over the site, including installing plugins and themes, managing users, and changing settings. This is the role you have when you first set up your site. You want to be careful who you give this access to. When Heidi and I are working on a new website, we haven't done that for some years now, but when we did that sort of thing, I would make her an administrator because she's someone I trust and she was going and making all sorts of modifications.
The next role is editor. Editors can publish and manage all posts and pages, including content written by others. They can't, though, change site settings or install plugins. Next, you have an author. Authors can write, edit, and publish their own posts only. And then there's contributors. They can write posts, but they can't publish them. Their posts go into a pending review queue for an editor or an administrator to approve. And then we have subscribers. Now, subscribers can log into the site and manage their own profile, but they can't create content. This role is useful for membership sites. You manage users through the user menu in the dashboard. Adding a new user requires providing their email address, choosing a username, and assigning a role.
So obviously, in just under 40 minutes, we have just scratched the surface at what WordPress can do. It's a very powerful tool. It's being used all over the place. And that means that there is a lot of support out there in a blindness context. You can find many people who know WordPress and know it well and are willing to give you advice about how to get started. And this powerful content management system that's actually quite user-friendly means that you can roll out over time quite a complex, massive website if you need to. And it will be accessible and you don't even necessarily need to know a single character of HTML, although that doesn't hurt if you want to proof what's going on when something doesn't seem to be working quite right. You can also, of course, as we just saw, preview pages in a browser.
So do check out WordPress. Go through the process if you're interested of getting a domain name, finding a reliable host with accessible tools. Hopefully one-click WordPress will be one of those options. Start playing with WordPress. There are many hosting companies that will let you put a site that's under construction behind some sort of screen so that the public can't see it until you're ready for them to see it. And you can have a lot of fun with this. The creative process of getting a website up and running is actually quite rewarding. So that's WordPress in a nutshell.
Speaker 3:
Do you want to leave a legacy for the next generation? Join the National Federation of the Blind Legacy Society, the Dream Makers Circle. Joining is easy. You can give a portion of a bank or investment account by simply filling out a payable on-death form at your bank and indicating the NFB should receive a percentage or a fixed amount upon your passing. Consider designating the NFB as a partial beneficiary of your life insurance, retirement, or in a trust or will. For more information, call Patty Chang at extension 2422 or email PChang, P-C-H-A-N-G, @nfb.org.
Jonathan Mosen:
Let us talk about Drupal now. Drupal is the content management system we use here at the National Federation of the Blind. So when you go to nfb.org or you go to any of our affiliates, you'll be seeing a Drupal website in action. The National Federation of the Blind has a special association with Drupal, thanks to Rachel Olivero. Now, Rachel was director of organizational technology here at the National Federation of the Blind. Rachel was blind herself and she did the effort to migrate the NFB's main website to Drupal. Then on February 3rd, 2019, Rachel died at the age of 36. The Drupal community had worked closely with Rachel and when they needed a name for their new default front end theme, the one that would ship with Drupal by default and be seen by visitors on millions of sites, they named it Olivero in her honor.
Drupal is free. It's open source, which means the code is publicly available. Anyone can contribute to it. And there are no license fees. A large global community of developers and organizations maintains it. The Drupal Association, which is a nonprofit based in Portland, Oregon, coordinates the community and stewards the project. More than half a million websites around the world run on Drupal today. That's roughly 2% of the web. So that's a big contrast from the 42% that we estimate WordPress has, but market share by raw count doesn't tell the full story. Drupal is especially dominant among the most sophisticated, high traffic and regulation-sensitive sites in existence. Government agencies, universities, large nonprofits, and major corporations choose Drupal when they need more than a simple publishing tool.
Why do large organizations choose Drupal? First, it's the all-important security. Drupal has a dedicated security team that reviews code, coordinates responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities, and publishes formal advisories on a predictable schedule. When a security issue services, Drupal releases a patch and announces it publicly. Organizations running government or healthcare sites cannot afford the chaos of an unexpected breach. Drupal's security process gives IT teams a framework to plan around.
Second, permissions. Drupal lets you create very granular user roles. You can have an editor who can write content but cannot publish it, a publisher who can publish articles but cannot touch anything in the navigation, a site administrator who can configure modules but cannot delete content. For a large organization with dozens of staff touching the website, that kind of role structure is essential. Third, structured content. Drupal lets you define exactly what fields a piece of content contains. A news article might have a title, a date, an author, a summary, a body, an image, and a set of tags. An event might have a title, a date, a location, a registration link, and a description. Drupal stores each of those as a separate field, which means you can build search filters, Screen reader listings, and data exports based on any of them. This is far more powerful than dumping everything into a single text box.
Fourth, configuration as code. Drupal stores its configuration, meaning things like content type definitions, field settings and view layouts, has YAML fields that you can export, version-control, and deploy through Screen reader pipelines. For a federal agency or a large institution, this means a developer can build and test a change in staging environments, review it with their team, and then deploy it to production in a controlled, repeatable way.
The most common question people ask when they hear about Drupal is how does it compare to WordPress? So here's the way I think about this. WordPress optimizes for getting a site running quickly with minimal technical effort. You pick a theme, you install some plugins, and you're live within hours. It's that quick. The trade-off though is that WordPress's security depends heavily on maintaining a large number of third-party plugins and those plugins vary considerably in quality. Drupal optimizes for long-term maintainability, security and complexity. Getting a Drupal site running takes more time and typically requires developer expertise. The trade-off is worth it if you need to model complex content, integrate with other systems, support multiple languages, or meet regulatory requirements for security. So if you have a need for Drupal and you don't have development experience, you may want to contract with someone to get you up and running and they can leave you with a site that will be robust and something you can work with for years to come as long as you make sure you keep updating it.
If you're an individual, a small nonprofit or a small business launching a website for the first time, WordPress is probably the right starting point. If you're a state agency, a national nonprofit, a university, or a large organization with a complex web presence and strict IT governance requirements, then Drupal deserves serious consideration. The National Federation of the Blind's choice of Drupal reflects the complexity of maintaining a national organization site with dozens of content contributors, multiple content types, affiliate integrations, and accessibility requirements that had to be built in from the start. When you log into a Drupal site, you see what's called the admin toolbar across the top of the page. It contains links to manage content, configure the site structure, add modules, manage user accounts, and access reports. The admin theme that Drupal uses by default is called Claro and it is built to meet web content accessibility guidelines 2.1 level AA. It uses generous font sizes, clearly underlined links, and visible focus indicators. Drupal's core administrative interface is genuinely accessible, but contributed modules, meaning add-ons built by the community, will vary in their accessibility quality just as they do in any software ecosystem. When you evaluate a Drupal site for your organization, test the specific admin workflows your editors will use with the specific screen reader and browser they use on the job. Do not rely on a general accessibility claim from a vendor. It's a good idea to test it yourself.
Now, let's take a look at creating content in Drupal. The fundamental building block of content is called a node. Every page, every article, every event on a Drupal site is a node and every node belongs to a content type, which is essentially a form template that defines what fields the node contains. Drupal ships with two content types out of the box. A basic page has a title and a body. You use it for static content that doesn't change often. An article has a title, an image, a body, and tags fields. So this is a little bit like posts in WordPress really. And it's meant for content that you publish regularly in date order, like news articles, blog posts, or press releases.
These two types are just the starting point though. You can create as many content types as your site needs. If your organization publishes job listings, you could create a job listing content type with fields for job title, department location, salary range, and application deadline. If you run a resource library, you could create a resource content type with fields for document type, target audience, and, say, file upload. So it's very powerful, very flexible. Drupal stores each field separately in the database, which means you can filter, sort, and display your content in any way you need. From a screen reader perspective, every field in a Drupal content type has a proper label element that Drupal's form builder associates programmatically with the input and screen readers announce field names correctly.
Required fields carry an asterisk and they're marked with a required attribute that screen readers announce as being required. Error messages appear inline and they're announced when they surface. When you edit a body field or any rich text field in Drupal, you use a text editor. Since Drupal 10, the default editor is called CKEditor 5. CKEditor is a separate open source project and it ships inside Drupal core. CKEditor 5 builds to WCAG 2.2 level A and level AA and it conforms with section 508 of the United States Rehabilitation Act. The editor includes a built-in accessibility help dialogue that you open by pressing alt plus the 0 key on Windows. Now that dialogue lists every keyboard shortcut the editor supports and it's fully accessible to screen readers.
So let me give you an example of some of the keyboard shortcuts that you're likely to use most often in CKEditor 5. If you press tab, it'll move you into the editor. Alt with F10 will shift focus to the toolbar where you can use arrow keys to move between buttons and enter to activate them. Control-B will apply bold as it does in many editor environments. Similarly, Control-I will apply italics. Control-K opens the link dialogue and you can apply a heading level by moving to the toolbars paragraph format dropdown, which lists heading one through heading six as options. Some of CKEditor 5's toolbar dropdown controls don't yet reliably announce the current selected option to NVDA. The font and size dropdowns, for instance, have an open accessibility bug on this. If your site configuration uses those controls, test them before rolling out to staff or contributors who use NVDA. The headings and paragraph format dropdown doesn't have this issue in my experience.
Now, if you prefer not to use the WYSIWYG editor, which is what CKEditor 5 is, then Drupal let's you configure text formats that accept plain text or filtered HTML. A site administrator can set up a plain text format that bypasses CK Editor entirely, giving screen reading uses a straightforward text area. This is the configuration decision the site makes, not something hardwired into Drupal. If you're going to do this, then you also have the benefit of a little tool I do want to make mention of somewhere in this seminar, so it may as well be now. And that is the ability to create HTML with the help of Leasey. Leasey from Hartgen Consultancy is an add-on for JAWS. It adds many productivity features. This is the first but not the final time that we mention Leasey today. Leasey has an HTML creation feature. So you can certainly, if you know your HTML syntax and you're confident that you can do it reliably, just write the HTML manually by hand if you've got your Drupal configured to accept that.
But if you're worried about getting the syntax right, if you're finding it hard to commit the HTML codes to memory, Leasey can really help. It has an HTML mode, so all you do is select the text and let's say you want to make that text a hyperlink, you bring up the Leasey HTML menu, you choose link, an edit field will pop up saying, "What do you want this link to be?" You type in the URL, you press enter, and you will see that the HTML has been inserted and formatted perfectly. You can do bulleted lists, you can do numbered lists, you can do all sorts of things with this menu in Leasey and it's just one way that Leasey can really supercharge JAWS.
Many content editors write in Microsoft Word and they paste into the content management system. And CKEditor 5 does include a feature called Paste from Office. It detects when you paste content that came from Microsoft Word or another Office application and it converts that content into clean semantic HTML. Heading styles in Word become real heading elements at the correct level. Words list styles become genuine ordered and unordered list elements. Bold and italic carryover, tables with header rows paste correctly, links paste correctly. What a glorious life. As ever, the best practice after pasting from Word is to do a quick review. Just use your screen reader's heading navigation to confirm that the heading structure looks okay. Read through the first few list items to confirm they're genuine list elements and not just added paragraphs. If anything looks off, CKEditor's toolbar has a restyle format button that strips inline styling from selected text. That button is accessible from the toolbar via alt-F10.
Let me talk a bit more about one of Drupal's greatest strengths and that is its module system. A module is a packaged feature that you install to add functionality to your Drupal site. Modules are to Drupal what plugins are to WordPress. The difference is that Drupal has a more structured review process, a dedicated security team that covers contributed modules under its advisory policy, and a smaller, more curated system overall. There is an address that you can go to on the official Drupal site that shows you the modules and at that address you can filter by Drupal version compatibility, maintenance status, and category. When you look at a module's page, there are a few things to check. First, you want to look at modules that have the security shield icon and the phrase "covered by the Security Advisory Policy". That means the Drupal security team will issue formal advisories if a vulnerability is found in that module and you can subscribe to those advisories.
Second, check the usage statistics. A module with 50,000 active installs is well-vetted. A module with 200 active installs may be experimental. Third, look at how recently the issue queue shows activity. That can be informative because a module whose last commit was, say, three years ago and whose issue queue is full of unanswered bugs is a maintenance risk.
So let's talk about some modules that most Drupal sites benefit from and then some that are especially relevant for accessibility. Pathauto generates clean, readable URLs automatically. Without it, Drupal assigns every page a path like Node/142. With Pathauto, a news article titled Spring Conference 2026 gets a URL like /news/spring-conference-2026. Token works alongside Pathauto and many other modules as a placeholder system, letting you insert dynamic values like the content title or the current date into URLs and templates. Metatag lets you manage the HTML metatags on each page, including the title and description tags that search engines and social media platforms use when they display your content. Redirect lets you create and manage 301 redirects, which is essential when you reorganize content and need old links to keep working.
Webform is the go-to module for any kind of form, contact forms, event registrations, surveys, applications. It has a fully accessible form builder in the admin and generates accessible HTML output. Admin Toolbar improves Drupal's admin menu by turning it into a flyout navigation, which makes it faster to reach deep admin pages. Backup and Migrate gives editors and administrators a straightforward way to export and import the site database. Editoria11y, which you pronounce "editorially", is a content accessibility checker developed and maintained by Princeton University. It ships as part of Drupal's CMS by default, which is Drupal's latest packaging for content teams released in January 2025.
You install Editoria11y and it adds a small toolbar to the bottom of the screen when you browse your site while logged in as an editor. That toolbar shows account of accessibility issues on the current page. You can expand it to see each issue described in plain English with guidance on how to fix it. Editoria11y checks for missing image alternative text, heading structure problems, empty links, tables without headers, and a range of other common content accessibility errors. It runs on the rendered page, meaning it catches problems that the editor alone might miss. It's fully keyboard-accessible and it works with NVDA, JAWS, and other screen readers.
As you can appreciate, we're giving you a quick overview of a range of tools and techniques today rather than teaching you how to use any of these, but we do of course have Drupal installations at the National Federation of the Blind. So I want to give you a quick demo. This one is from the NFB of California website that we're working on right now. I am logged into the dashboard, so if I query my window title-
Screen reader:
Mosen at NFB.org National Federation of the Blind of California. Personal Microsoft Edge.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'm at the top of the dashboard and if I down-arrow-
Screen reader:
Heading level two, toolbar items.
Jonathan Mosen:
We're on the toolbar for the dashboard that I mentioned earlier and the button that is pressed in this toolbar will determine what we see on the rest of the page. By default, the manage button is pressed when you log in.
Screen reader:
Manage toggle button pressed.
Jonathan Mosen:
But there are other buttons as well.
Screen reader:
Heading level three, administration menu. Link, tools. Link, content. Link, structure. Link, appearance. Link, extend. Link, configuration. Link, people. Link, reports.
Jonathan Mosen:
To emphasize the reason why we're seeing these items now is because the manage button is pressed on the toolbar so it exposed these at a heading level three. If I down-arrow-
Screen reader:
Vertical orientation button. Shortcuts toggle button. Link, CiviCRM. Edit toggle button. [email protected] toggle button.
Jonathan Mosen:
That button is not pressed. It just says, "toggle button". If I press space to activate that toggle button, I will then switch from the managed part of the toolbar to the part of the toolbar that allows me to configure my own account and on we can go. What I'd like to do is also press the number one. That'll take us to any heading level one on this page.
Screen reader:
You are now logged in. Heading level one.
Jonathan Mosen:
And I'd like to let the screen reader read this because it just goes to show you how flexible, how customizable the Drupal user experience can be. Bear in mind that we've customized this for an NFB website installation.
Screen reader:
Heading level one, you are now logged in. Welcome to the administrative profile of your website. Bullet navigate to the administrative menu that lists the manage button, shortcuts, CiviCRM link, or to the user account button to log out. Use the training manual for the National Federation of the Blind Affiliates/Division websites that will download a Word document to learn about the specific content types and theme of this site. Link, download training document. Link is external. Bullet find and extensive. Link, Drupal user guide. Link is external. For users with minimal knowledge of this content management system. Bullet Ask questions with fellow NFB Drupal users through the NF net listserv. If you are not subscribed to that listserv or need to connect with NFB communications or technology staff, please email.
Jonathan Mosen:
So now that we're logged in, we can either create new content or we might want to modify existing content. Sometimes something changes and you want to update an existing webpage. Let's look at that scenario first. If you're working on a site regularly, you will know what the key pages are. And having explored it, I know that there is an About Us section on the site. So I'm going to perform a find in my screen reader.
Screen reader:
JAWS find dialogue. Find what-
Jonathan Mosen:
And just type "about us" to get me there.
Screen reader:
Link collapsed, About Us.
Jonathan Mosen:
And the About Us section is collapsed. The reason why it's collapsed is that Drupal has an excellent menu system in its defaults and if we press enter, we can expand this menu.
Screen reader:
Banner region, navigation region, list with four items. About Us collapsed link expanded.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now it's expanded. So if I down-arrow, we will see the pages under the About Us section.
Screen reader:
Visited link, Who We Are. Link, Our History. Link, Board of Directors. Link, News and Updates.
Jonathan Mosen:
As you can see, I've visited the Who We Are section before. I'm going to go up.
Screen reader:
Link, board ... Link, our ... visited link Who We Are.
Jonathan Mosen:
And press enter.
Screen reader:
About Us group, Who We Are. Link, banner region. Navigation region. About Us, National Federation of the Blind of California. Personal Microsoft Edge. About Us, National-
Jonathan Mosen:
Now it's come up and I can just read this page by default so I can navigate by heading.
Screen reader:
About Us heading level one, Who We Are heading level two. The National Federation of the Blind of California is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit volunteer membership organization comprised of blind and interested sighted persons.
Jonathan Mosen:
There's plenty of interesting information on here. I'm going to bring up my list of links now.
Screen reader:
Late list dialogue, links list view.
Jonathan Mosen:
And press the letter E.
Screen reader:
Extend edit, 20 of 35.
Jonathan Mosen:
Edit is what I want to do so I'll press enter. And of course I only have access to this edit link because I am logged into the dashboard.
Screen reader:
Edit basic page About Us, National Federation of the Blind of California. Personal Microsoft Edge.
Jonathan Mosen:
So you remember that we talked earlier about the content types in Drupal. One of the default content types is basic page and since this page just has some text and a picture, it qualifies as a basic page. It's a perfect content type for this sort of content. Now that we have the page up on the screen, I can navigate by form field. I'm going to press E to get me to the first edit field.
Screen reader:
Title star editor required. About Us.
Jonathan Mosen:
If I go into forms mode, I could change this too About the National Federation of the Blind of California if I wanted to do that. I'm just going to navigate down now with the arrow keys.
Screen reader:
Language, combo box collapsed. English. F landing page title summary. Remove button. Page banner button expanded. Show all links button. Table with six columns and two rows. Preview. Link, change order. Family posing on dot, dot, JPG.
Jonathan Mosen:
There's a graphic that we've uploaded here and of course it's important that we have alt text for that graphic. So if I down-arrow.
Screen reader:
Alternative text star. Required edit, mom and dad hold hands with their three kids while posing for a family photo on the marina dock.
Jonathan Mosen:
And there's even an explainer.
Screen reader:
This text will be used by screen readers, search engines, or when the image cannot be loaded.
Jonathan Mosen:
So there are plenty of fields here, but if I press E again.
Screen reader:
Title edit, blank. Rich text editor, editing area, main. Press-
Jonathan Mosen:
I press E another time and now we're in a rich text editor and if I press enter ...
Screen reader:
The National Federation of the Blind of California-
Jonathan Mosen:
I'll just stop it there, but we're now editing the text that we saw previously so you can make changes here and there's a save button towards the bottom of the page. So after you've made any change that you need to make, if the checkbox to publish is checked, let's have a look at that.
Screen reader:
Virtual ... display on home page. Check, create new revision, checkbox checked. Provide a manual link, checkbox checked. Published, checkbox checked.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yep. So the checkbox to publish it is checked. I'll down-arrow.
Screen reader:
Save button.
Jonathan Mosen:
And there's the save button. So when I press that, it will create a revision. That's good because it means if for some reason we needed to revert to the previous version, it's easy enough to do that and we will have updated the page. Let's briefly take a look at what happens if we want to create a new page. I'll bring up the list of links again.
Screen reader:
Links, list dialogue. Links, list-
Jonathan Mosen:
And press the letter C.
Screen reader:
Content.
Jonathan Mosen:
Or press enter.
Screen reader:
Main region. Content. National Federation of the Blind-
Jonathan Mosen:
Now I'm on a page with a lot of links, but there's a cool trick here which makes sure that you can get to adding content really quickly. I'll bring the list of links up again.
Screen reader:
Links, list dialogue.
Jonathan Mosen:
And I'm just going to press the plus symbol.
Screen reader:
Plus add content, 22 of 185.
Jonathan Mosen:
That takes me to add content, so nice and straightforward. I have seen Drupal installations where that doesn't work so it's possible that that's something that we have added here.
Screen reader:
Plus add content.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'll press enter.
Screen reader:
Add content National Federation of the Blind of California. Personal Microsoft Edge. Add-
Jonathan Mosen:
This demonstrates the power of Drupal because I want to show you that we have created our own content types suitable for what we do. We have the default basic page and article content types, but we have others based on what we do. I'm going to press the number one to get me to a heading level one.
Screen reader:
Add content, heading level one.
Jonathan Mosen:
And now it's down-arrow.
Screen reader:
Link, remove from default shortcuts. Link, article. News articles for time sensitive content like news, press releases, or blog posts. Link, basic page. News basic pages for your static content such as an About Us page. Link, blog. Single blog will be added here. Link, board of directors. Each details for specific details about the member needs to be added here. Link, bulletin. Link, chapter details. Add details of specific chapter. Link, chapters page. Specific chapters page where admin can upload manner, title and description about chapter. Link, event. Event details should be added. Link, gallery. Gallery content type used to store images for the gallery. Link, homepage. Configure which content item is displayed as the front page of your website. Link, news. Custom content type for the news for affiliate sites. Link, programs. Programs and the affiliates. Link, resolution. Link, web form. A basic page with a web form attached.
Jonathan Mosen:
The form fields you will be asked to complete will depend on the content type that you select. So if you choose basic page, you'll get a different kind of form with different fields to fill in than if you had, say, chosen resolution. I'll bring the list of links up again.
Screen reader:
Links, list-
Jonathan Mosen:
I'm going to type, "BA".
Screen reader:
Basic page, 16 of 28.
Jonathan Mosen:
And press enter.
Screen reader:
Create basic page National Federation of the Blind of California. Personal ...
Jonathan Mosen:
Now, I'm not going to save this, but let me just show you briefly how we can create the page.
Screen reader:
Virtual PC.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'm going to press E.
Screen reader:
Title star edit. Required. Blank. Create basic page-
Jonathan Mosen:
I turn forms mode on and I'll type-
Screen reader:
Just some of the reasons Drupal is worth considering.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'll press the tab key.
Screen reader:
Language combo box, English.
Jonathan Mosen:
We have.
Screen reader:
Spanish. Not specified. Not applicable.
Jonathan Mosen:
So we can have English or Spanish.
Screen reader:
English. Remove button. Page banner button collapsed. Blank.
Jonathan Mosen:
You probably want to upload a picture here for the page banner.
Screen reader:
About text. Format link. Text format combo box, full HTML.
Jonathan Mosen:
We can have full HTML or ...
Screen reader:
Basic HTML. Restricted HTML.
Jonathan Mosen:
Basically, full HTML is fine.
Screen reader:
Full HTML.
Jonathan Mosen:
So I'll press the tab key.
Screen reader:
Rich text editor, rich text editor, editing area, main. Press alt plus zero for help.edit. Blank.
Jonathan Mosen:
Not only can I press alt-zero, but I can also press alt-F10, as I mentioned previously.
Screen reader:
Editor toolbar, toolbar, paragraph, heading button, menu.
Jonathan Mosen:
And now we're on the toolbar.
Screen reader:
Heading menu. Paragraph checked.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'm just up and down-arrowing through this.
Screen reader:
Heading two, two ... Heading three. Heading four. Heading five. Heading six.
Jonathan Mosen:
So I can select text. I can go to the toolbar, I can choose the heading level, I can choose the type of content that I'm creating. I'm going to press escape.
Screen reader:
Leaving menus, paragraph, heading button menu. Rich text editor, editing area. Main.
Jonathan Mosen:
Because I have created a documented Microsoft Word, and by fortunate happenstance, I only just happen to have it open in Microsoft Word right now. So I'm going to alt-tab into it.
Screen reader:
Drupalpagedemo.doc's Word.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now, I've used Word formatting, so if I have a quick look here in Word.
Screen reader:
Heading level two. So many things to like about Drupal. Here are just some of the things that impress me about the Drupal content management system. Bullet, it's powerful. Bullet, it's highly customizable.
Jonathan Mosen:
So we're in a bulleted list here. I'm going to select all of this text by pressing control-A.
Screen reader:
Selected, so many things-
Jonathan Mosen:
I got to copy it to the clipboard with control-C.
Screen reader:
Copied.
Jonathan Mosen:
And now I'm going to alt-tab back into Drupal.
Screen reader:
Create basic page, National Federation of the Blind of California. Personal Microsoft Edge. Create-
Jonathan Mosen:
Now I'll just confirm that I'm in the right place.
Screen reader:
Blank.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yes, I'm in the rich text editor, so I'm going to press control-V to paste that text in.
Screen reader:
Pasted.
Jonathan Mosen:
And because this editor is a WYSIWYG editor, a What You See Is What You Get editor, if I go to the top of the page now by pressing control home.
Screen reader:
Heading level two, so many things to like about Drupal.
Jonathan Mosen:
Here we are and we have the heading level two. And if I were to down-arrow, you would see that the list has been preserved. There's another heading further down the page. I'll go down to the bottom.
Screen reader:
Bottom. Support material for those maintaining-
Jonathan Mosen:
And go up.
Screen reader:
Here around ... There is plenty ... Heading level two, more information.
Jonathan Mosen:
There's my more information heading level two. If I keep going up.
Screen reader:
Blank. Level one. Bullet, there is a supportive community. List ... Bullet, NFB-
Jonathan Mosen:
And there's my bulleted list. So it's all copied and pasted over from Word and that's a very nice way to produce your content. Write it in Word, copy it into Drupal. It'll strip out everything that's not necessary and leave you with what you need, then we can go and save this page and make any other adjustments. So that is a very brief look at the very powerful Drupal content management system.
That concludes this episode of Access On, the Technology Podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. To send in a contribution for a future episode, email us. Attach an audio clip or just write it down and send it to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. To keep up to date with Access On, follow us on Mastodon. [email protected]. That's [email protected] on Mastodon. To subscribe to an announcement-only email list about upcoming episodes, send a blank message to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. To learn more about the National Federation of the Blind, visit our website, NFB.org, or phone us, 410-659-9314. That's 410-659-9314. And be sure to check out the Nation's Blind podcast right from where you heard this podcast.