Take your eyeglasses off (they’re assistive technology) and see how easy it is to use a website or interface. Try surfing the web with your eyes closed while a web page is read aloud to you. Or, enlarge your fonts to 3× their normal size, crank down the contrast and brightness on your monitor, and only use your thumb on your non-dominant hand. For many people, there is no other way to interact with the web.

MODX has always been a stellar platform for powering accessible websites, but the back-end Manager falls short. People who use assistive technology such as screen readers, enlarged fonts and alternate input devices were never really considered—that must change.

It’s time to act now and right that wrong! Making an accessible MODX CMS Manager is the right thing—for everybody, but we need your help to complete this huge task.

Our Goal: Let’s Bring MODX to Everyone, Today

Much of the innovation in MODX CMS stemmed from client needs, but an initiative of this magnitude can’t be the burden of a single customer. Examples of past innovation include caching that can support millions of visitors per day, to amazing multi-site and multi-language capabilities, to being able to work off S3-stored images as if they were on your local server to name a few … the list could go on and on.

When The Ohio State University came to us earlier this year, we were excited by getting the backing to finally make this happen. We needed to accomplish a few key goals:

• Protect their current investment in MODX Revolution sites with a clean upgrade
• Make it possible to allow anyone to use MODX for managing content
• Make it easy to install in an existing 2.3.x-based site

MODX has a lot of traction on campus. For site administrators and content creators, the Manager interface is logical, intuitive, and simple to use. But there are a number of staff on campus who rely on assistive technologies, such as screen readers, or who have other vision impairments or need access by using the keyboard alone because of a motor disability.

To this point, MODX hasn’t been a practical solution for them. But Ohio State and others in the accessibility community are working with the MODX team over the next few months to help guide changes to the Manager interfaces so that they can be used effectively by everyone, including our staff with disabilities.

Ken Petri
Director, Ohio State Web Accessibility Center

Taking on the Challenge

To accomplish this, we assembled a team of experienced professionals in both Accessibility and advanced Manager development. Since kicking off the effort, we’ve completed a ton of research and developed a proof of concept for some key functionality. Now it’s time to polish the work and get it out to users everywhere, just like you.

What it Looks Like Today

We recently opened a GitHub repository for the Accessible MODX Manager project where the work is being planned, tracked and developed. Here are some of the items we’ve identified and started to address:

• Keyboard Navigation
• ARIA roles, states, and properties for all the major areas of the Manager UI
• Visual Contrast to meet WCAG guidelines
• Clean up text presentation for screen readers
• Focus indication

We’ve already prototyped and proven we can create a Manager that will be a first-class citizen of the accessible software world. Now it’s time to polish the work, test thoroughly and document fully. Additional work to do:

• Rework many form elements
• Implement keyboard navigation on all pages
• Ensure focus follows dynamic windows, modals and form errors
• Address contrast issues across the board
• Lots and lots and lots of Testing and iterative adjustments

The final result will be a new Manager Theme you can install in MODX 2.3 or later. A simple change of your Manager Theme setting will enable anyone to use MODX to create and manage sites in an accessible CMS.

Be a Part of the Story

To complete this initiative, we need to raise an additional $25,000 USD to match what Ohio State has funded to date. Your generosity will help countless people around the world and foster the continuing growth of the MODX platform. Every donation will immediately be put to good use, paying the folks doing the work and providing funding to hire experts and testing services when needed.

If you use MODX today, you should help us do the right thing and bring MODX to everyone in the world. Every amount helps moves us towards our goal, no matter the size.

MODX community member and screencaster, Jeroen Kenters, put together this special episode of his Web Dev Stories screencast to show his support and share why it’s such an important initiative.

And, if you use MODX in a Government, Education or Enterprise setting, you should definitely contribute today! Go click that button right now and help ensure MODX continues to be the cornerstone of all your web projects.

How to Give

You can donate today using a Paypal account or most major credit cards. If you need to be invoiced, contact us to make it happen.

Stretch Goals

There’s still more to do. While we don’t have concrete plans today, if we surpass our $50,000 USD target, we’d love to keep improving the Manager in other ways, and improve the experience of working in MODX:

• Document the improvements and functionality for organizations that need it for their own internal compliance documentation
• Installer—redesign and rework the installer to be not only a much better experience, but also to be fully accessible as well
• System Configuration—rework the system configuration to streamline setting up and configuring MODX by anyone
• Non-ExtJS Content Editing Interface for Mobiles
• Hire a UX pro to tackle some of the more complex areas in the Manager UI, like ACLs

Updates

Campaign updates will appear here and on the MODX Blog. To stay up to date on the campaign, be sure to subscribe by email.

Accessibility Campaign Update #1

Update for February 24, 2015

We launched our fundraising campaign to make the MODX Revolution Manager accessible just over a week ago. Since then, we’ve had a wonderful response, with generous donors from around the world. To date we’ve raised a $29,648 including the $25,000 from The Ohio State University—just shy of 60% of our goal! The other comes from:

• 76 awesome MODX Community members
• Each contributing an average of $57
• Three individuals generously gave $500
• Eight others showed a big thumbs-up with $100
• 43% of supporters have made contributions of $25

In addition to our progress, our campaign has garnered media attention, with more on the way, including CMS Critic and SitePoint’s Versioning newsletter.

If you’ve already participated, thank you and stay tuned for more updates soon. If you’re a MODXer and haven't yet contributed, please help support this worthy cause!