Relaunch of the website “Naturpark Südschwarzwald” (Southern Black Forest Nature Park
) with a special attention towards accessibility.
Due to planned improvements and enhancements the website of the Southern Black Forest Nature Park, previously built with the CMS webEdition, was migrated to Drupal by SinnOptics.
Alongside the need to be able to flexibly add new content types and make it easier for editors to manage contents the main reasons to use Drupal were community-oriented featues, modular extensibility, search engine optimization and compliance with the modern requirements of accessibility.
Thus it was payed attention to fulfill many of the criteria of the WCAG2 already in the run-up.
One highlight is the main navigation thats implemented as a mega dropdown menu. It allows to have a quick overview of all important pages while not excluding any users of assistive equipment because of the use of a static vertical sub navigation alongside.
Thanks to CCK and Views it worked out to make the extensive amount of content easily findable and sortable. On large pages content can be grouped in tabs that are also navigable by keyboard. For an even better traceablility Drupal’s core search was replaced by Lucene, which results in having not only crucially better results but also adds the possibilty of having alternative search suggestions.
Many pages can be commented on and rated by users. Inaccessible image CAPTCHAS were dropped purposely - a favourable exception when regarding web projects of this kind.
A little online store was implemented using Ubercart, complementing the web presence with products such as maps and hiking guides of the region.
A project showing that accessibility is by no means contradictory to innovative design.