Joomla 4 accessibility support: Make Your Joomla Website Accessible

As you all know Joomla 4 Beta 3 is out and we are now looking for the official release of Joomla 4 in some weeks later. On the Joomla 4 Beta 3 version, all the new features were released and the most impressive is the accessibility feature which is focused on this blog.

Since the beginning, Joomla 4 is created for everyone and the Joomla team always try to make Joomla become an CMS as human as possible and can reach everybody. And now, Joomla 4 is finally supporting accessibility that will help disability people with color contrast and accessibility plugins in making Joomla website.

What is accessibility?

In terms of website and technology, accessibility in a nutshell is guaranteeing a website is made in manner not only for the general users but also for disability people as well. The web is fundamentally designed to work for all people whatever their hardware, software, language, location, or ability. Therefore, accessibility support plays an important role in modern web design trends and technologies. It has a lot of good examples of accessibility support in technology such as Microsoft Edge and Apple. But in the CMS world, Joomla is the first one that integrates and fully supports accessibility in the next major release Joomla 4.

The need for accessibility support in Joomla emphasizes the direction of Joomla that is “all together" and “Inclusion is in our heart". In Joomla 4, the UI is designed following the WCAG 2.0 guideline with color contrast and the structure is assembled in such a way that the element switching, finding menu items are easy and less effort. The details of accessibility support will be introduced in brief discussion below.

Joomla 4 accessibility support

Joomla team has taken a lot of effort to change many things with the purpose to add accessibility features. The most visible and significant changes are seen is color orientation and menu style. Let's explore the detailed information now.

Color

According to the guideline of WCAG 2.0, the contrast ratio of foreground color and background color of text has to be at least 4:5:1. And based on the fact of accessibility support, Joomla team chose color contrast for Joomla 4 admin UI is 4:8:1 with a lightweight interface and a clean approach.

Administrator Panel

A new interface of Joomla 4 administrator dashboard has come with many improvements to make it easier for daily workflow on Joomla. In Joomla 4, the administrator UI was designed with a sidebar on the left that holds the important menu items such as Components, Media, Users, etc. Moreover, Joomla 4 dashboard sidebar will come with sub items that ensure Joomla users with accessibility tools getting everything easily without moving further.

Otherwise, the control panel in Joomla 4 is configurable. Joomla users can configure the items availability and position as you want, so the general users and disability users can use it more easily and conveniently. This new feature will help you get your hands on everything quickly and flexibly.

Menu items

Another accessibility support in Joomla 4 is menu system and menu items. Joomla 4 owns a smart and accessibility friendly menu system which helps you less movement while using Joomla 4 dashboard. In the new design of Joomla 4, whenever you hover over a menu item, the submenu items will open and you can access all these items from there. This new design will help the user with accessibility issues easily in accessing menu system and menu items.

Keyboards

One more crucial thing in accessibility support is about making sure all content and links on your website are accessible through the keyboard. You can use Proper HTML structure tags to make sure your content and links is accessible via keyboard- only navigation.

How to enable accessibility feature on Joomla 4

You may now wonder how to enable accessibility features on Joomla 4 and do you need to install any third-party extensions to make the accessibility features effective on Joomla 4. A good news for you is you do not need any third-party extension since Joomla 4 has an inbuilt accessibility plugin and you can enable it by going to your plugin manager and search for accessibility.

The fact that you can enable this plugin on either Joomla backend, frontend or both and the Accessibility icon will be shown on the bottom right corner after enabling. This plugin will give you the capacity for a variety of things including but not limiting to managing text size, text spacing, managing colors and many more.

Wrap up

Joomla 4 accessibility support is a big and great step for technology and humanity. With the aims at delivering technology as well as Joomla for everyone, the initiative of introducing the accessibility support in Joomla 4 is worth praising.

All the information about Joomla 4 accessibility team and their purpose, you can found here