This is a transcript. For the complete video, see Modernizing Drupal’s UI and Improving Accessibility with The Olivero & Claro Themes - Tag1 TeamTalk #021.
Michael Meyers: [00:00:00] Welcome everybody to the Tag TeamTalk on the future of Drupal's user interface with a focus on accessibility. Today, we're going to dig into two of the five Drupal 9 strategic initiatives, the easier out of the box experience. A key part of that is the Claro admin theme.
As well as the modernizing of the front end of Drupal, which is the Olivero theme. We're also going to pull back the curtain a little bit and talk about, what it's like to be a key contributor to an initiative, what it's like to go through the development process, how it works, you know, the contribution work/life balance, and how to manage all of that. and so, excited to jump in here. My name is Michael Meyers. I'm the managing director at Tag1, and I'll be the host of today's show. We're joined today by a very special guest Kat Shaw, who's a senior developer at Lullabot and a CPACC certified accessibility expert.
In addition to her work at Lullabot, Kat is a member of the strategic initiative team. That's building that new front end theme, and she's also a contributor, the modernization initiative, the Claro initiative. So Kat is very involved in the future of Drupal, and I'm excited to dig into that and learn a lot more -- Kat, Welcome, and thanks for joining us.
Kat Shaw: [00:01:25] Thanks for having me.
Michael Meyers: [00:01:27] So let's step back a sec. I don't know that everybody is familiar with Claro or Olivero. So I think it'd be really helpful, just to talk through them at a high level. I think, you know, You had mentioned that you might want to demo some stuff for the folks that are just listening. We'll be really descriptive, Kat's an accessibility expert after all.
So, I dunno, why don't we start with the new front end theme?
Kat Shaw: [00:01:51] Sure. Okay. Let me share my screen. Hold on one second.
Okay, can you see my screen okay? .
And do you see Olivero?
Michael Meyers: [00:02:03] I do.
Kat Shaw: [00:02:04] Great, okay. So this is the beautiful Olivero theme. This is the front page. So this is a demo site that we have created and we have a link we'll share obviously with the people that ends up redirecting to the site. So, we're just in desktop view right now.
And if I just go through as a regular user and I hover over, you can see that it has drop-downs now. So over here and has a search.
Michael Meyers: [00:02:38] Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Kat Shaw: [00:02:40] So it's pretty snazzie dazzie. So if I go up here and I'll just refresh it and hopefully it'll come up here, it's really cool. It's using Tugboat, which is a pretty cool tool.
That people should check out.
Michael Meyers: [00:03:01] Tugboat's the Lullabot design system and automated QA testing.
Kat Shaw: [00:03:06] Yes. Yeah. And we use it for all of our testing for all of our PRs and it makes it really great, because we can just automatically test each one of our PRs right then, instead of having to pull it into our locals, So it makes life a lot easier.
So if I just tab through, you can see the first item that you see on the screen is skip to main navigation, skip to main content, which is always what should be the first item. So I would just tab through that. Could see it goes there.
Michael Meyers: [00:03:38] You can tab through the admin menus. you know, so that that's much better accessibility.
Kat Shaw: [00:03:49] Yeah. So, yeah. So I'm going to go ahead and go back actually, and just get through this.
Michael Meyers: [00:03:53] Is that something that existed historically? Or is that something that's new in, in Olivero?
Kat Shaw: [00:04:00] It should have always existed. I believe so, in Drupal. So I think that's a truthful thing, but that's a good question.
So I'm going to go back in the navigation and you can see that each item on here is keyboard accessible, which is very important. And it also follows a specific order, which is very important. Sometimes you'll find a site to tab through. So I'm going backwards right now, but you'll find a site as you tab through.
It might go from, you know, right here to the bottom of the site, back up to the top. So tab order is very important. you could see that you can have keyboard focus on each item. So a person visually knows where they're at on a page. So, you have users that use a keyboard exclusively, and they're able to know exactly where they're at as they go through the site.
So that was a very, this is a very important thing when it comes to Olivero is accessibility and usability. Accessibility is one of the things that I focus on. So, that's what I love about it. So if I go over here and I click over here and we'll go ahead and click out of the admin menu, make it smaller. You can see what the mobile version looks like. So I'll tab here. This is the mobile menu.
Michael Meyers: [00:05:31] So, is it, is it just responsive? When you, when you size it, it automatically shifts into this mode.
Kat Shaw: [00:05:39] Yeah, that's right. It's a responsive site. And, again, each item receives a keyboard focus properly in the right order and also receives focus, visual focus, and a color contrast was also checked on each item.
So. we're still going through testing. We're always going through testing and, you know, that's the basics of the front page and if you go to this demo site, you can go through each one of these and you can see examples of what it can do. So, I can go here and go to the job application, and I can see it's a pretty good size form.
I'll click apply and you can see what the error messages look like. So you can see that they're very specific to this form, which is very important. One of the things we're working on right now is actually inline errors. So, we'll get that worked out. And, some of the other features are CSS grid. You can add that to the site as well.
So all of this is using that. Just to comment. You have sidebar feature tables with a sticky header. so there's, you know, there's a lot of options. That's one of the things that they really focused on was also flexibility.
Michael Meyers: [00:07:06] It's a bunch of components and features and capabilities that are baked in that you can, you can build on top of this.
What I love about it is, you know, like historically, you know, when you launched a default Drupal site, like it was so obvious that it was Drupal.
Kat Shaw: [00:07:23] or, like
Michael Meyers: [00:07:24] Garland, this yeah. And, and, you know, that was a good one, theme for it's time. But, you know, I really like this because it looks great out of the box.
Like you, you could just swap logo in the upper left hand side, and you've got a really well thought out, really nice looking modern site, so that this is really cool.
Kat Shaw: [00:07:42] Yeah, it's really great. And you know, you can go into the settings and you have an option even to enable the mobile menu at all widths. So that mobile menu, the normal default, just to have the menu all the way across.
But if you want, you can enable just to have a mobile menu at all widths, if you want. and also the blue is obviously the default when you install the site, but you can also change it to gray and white as well.
Michael Meyers: [00:08:05] Oh, wow.
Kat Shaw: [00:08:07] Yeah. So, yeah. This enabled _____ options is here for testing, but I believe that's going to be removed when it goes into, into core.
and then, you know, yeah,
Michael Meyers: [00:08:20] It's a great transition to a Claro since we're on the back end here.
Kat Shaw: [00:08:25] Yeah, that sounds great.
Michael Meyers: [00:08:26] Why don't, why don't you tell folks about Claro, you know, what it is, you know, and, and what you're going to show off here.
Kat Shaw: [00:08:34] Sure. So Claro, you know, Olivero's, the theme layer for the front end, if you want to say that, and Claro is the theme layer for the admin interface.
So if I go into content, so this Olivero demo site is using Claro, And it basically is what they did is they created a copy of seven and then they re-themed all of the components for it. So, and they made sure that accessibility was a key feature when they did that. So again, you know, if you go through all of the elements, you can see that they receive a very obvious keyboard focus.
And, it's very usable. let's see. If we go to let's see, what would be a good place, a status report perhaps.
You can again see that the add to default shortcuts, pops up and you can see each item very clearly. So, you have a lot of different features. It's very clean. If you go to the block layout and you wanted to look at the demonstration, it's just pretty much the same there. but it's just, you know, you'll just notice it's just a lot cleaner.
It's not as, just gray on gray, on gray. it's got some color to it, but it's still very simple and clean and clear, and it has a lot of space around it. The navigation and everything is, is by default now. So, yeah, that's pretty much it.
Michael Meyers: [00:10:22] Awesome. So, Improving the end user UI, improving the site admin and site builder UI, making Drupal a lot easier to use, makes a lot of sense.
You know, I think that's where a lot of criticism from Drupal has been placed. And I, you know, I'm in his Dries Note, last week, two weeks ago. Time's flying at DrupalCon. Dries announced, you know, these five initiatives just for Drupal 9 , you know, in the past they were nine or 10, so he's really focused them down.
Three out of the five are front end, you know, Claro, Olivero and then there's the, you know, APIs for the decoupled, you know, front end and menus and what not, but, what, what's your take on that? Do you think that that is the right focus for Drupal?
Kat Shaw: [00:11:22] Yeah. You know, I think that, you know, I know that with both of them, you know, that's the thing about both of these.
If you'll notice that they both have a lot of similarities, they both really depend on having a very important, clean look and feel. They both want to focus on having flexibility for the users. They want to have an ease of setting up and use. So that's, what's really great about both of them.
They're visually clean, being visually clean is very, very important. And I know that, for both Olivero and Claro, that, the way that Drupal is perceived by, by people, like new users, stakeholders, new developers, you know, everybody, under that umbrella, is, very, very important. So, you know, when you first set up the site, having it be a very simple install, was a very important thing.
And also just having it look nice and very clean and. Being impressed like, Oh, wow. You know? And so that was very important. So I definitely think that the front end and being clear, you know, clean and accessible to all users, all of those things were very, very important.
Michael Meyers: [00:12:41] The, you know, Claro, Olivero, they, they looked really impressive to me.
Where are they in their development cycle or, you know, are they 50% done, 80% done, you know, do you have a sense of how far along these are, when we're going to see them as a default core feature?
Kat Shaw: [00:12:59] Well, Olivero is, I'd say it's maybe about 60% done. Maybe. it's you know about there, but it's hopefully, it'll be experimental in Drupal 9.1.
That's what we're shooting for right now. And we're shooting for it to be the default in 9.2. So we're really working really hard on it and we definitely would love help to get it there. It's going really well though. People are really excited about it. So, and Claro, I'd say it's about 80% there. So right now, it's actually in Drupal.
It's been there since 8.8. so the goal is to get it to be the default admin theme. it's, there's a code freeze in October and, that's for 9.1, as I was mentioning and it's in there, I believe as a beta right now. And they're trying to get as stable. So. That's where those two are at. but both of those Claro and Olivero, definitely would love people's help.
Some senior reviews would be great. Have some code. Yeah. So that's where they're at right now.
Michael Meyers: [00:14:08] So what's your role been on these initiatives? You know, how have you been participating in them? What, what kind of work have you been focusing on?
Kat Shaw: [00:14:15] Well, when I started at Lullabot, you know, there was a break between when I started and, when I started my first project.
So I, you know, I have to keep busy. It drives me nuts to be bored. I just, I can't just be sitting on my laurels or whatever you call it. So, I just went and kind of hit people up around, Lullabot and then said, Hey, you know, I want to work and what does anybody, they have everything they need. And, and I mentioned that I really love accessibility and stuff.
When I did that, I automatically talked to Mike Herschel and Christina right away. So Mike Herschel was obviously with Olivero project and Christina's with the Claro project and they were very excited. So yeah. I, what I did is that both of those projects obviously already existed. And so I worked on both of those with the designs, the Sigma designs on finding and reporting, and creating fixes, if you want to do in reporting fixes for those issues that I could find, and also giving ideas on the designs for like, for instance, on Claro.
We were going through the inline errors for forms trying to figure out how to make it. So that would work for people that are color blind. So at the time, the inline errors were red, under the form fields, but they didn't have any other kind of indicator that they were, there was an error.
And so we were talking through that and trying to figure out, what would be a good way to. Specify to somebody there was an error. So it ended up that we use icons. So, you know, things like that. And then what are the best ways to show errors to users and everything? So, that would be an example of how we did that.
And with Olivero it's, you know, same kind of thing. They're both obviously set up in different ways. So, they're at different points. So how I worked with both of those were a little bit different, but what I did for both of those pretty much the same.
Michael Meyers: [00:16:22] I feel like a lot of people think that, you know, core development and strategic initiative development is like a secret cabal. Like, is there, you know, are there a lot of people working on this? is it a small core team that's doing the majority of the work? Are they, you know, you, you know, you were referred to this by awesome people at Lullabot that are engaged in the community. Like, you know, is it easy to find an access and, you know, so just give me a sense of like, how that works.
Kat Shaw: [00:16:52] Well, yeah. You know, it's interesting because I don't, you know, before I started, I didn't, I didn't really know much about it. So I do think that it's, something I can see how people feel that way, but definitely for Olivero, I'll just start there, with the front end theme, that work is mostly done through the Olivero team, but they have tons of volunteers that help out and, That you know, create patches, and.
Test out things and do all of those things. So it's not just one core group. So, but the Olivero team is, is, you know, mostly through Lullabot, but there's also, I shouldn't say mostly there's a few people through Lullabot, there's also people like Mike Gifford and Andrew MacPherson and there's people on the accessibility, committee.
I don't know if you call it the committee with Drupal, the Drupal core group that we meet with, a lot. So those people are very, very involved in helping us out in getting Olivero right on track. And they've also been obviously involved in the Claro project. So it's, it's interesting, you know, the core group, when you call like the super core group, I actually have never had a meeting with the super cabal core group in Drupal, but I've had meetings with the accessibility group and they're awesome. and I think that what happens is they delegate out to their specific groups, like the accessibility group and the security group and whatever other groups they have. And those groups are the ones that kind of lead the way in on what's going on.
Obviously I do know that I talked with, You know, I met with the teams this week, both teams. And they did mention that when, before I had gone to both projects, Dries and the top people did, were involved in the project. So it's not like they were never involved in the project. They were involved in the projects.
Yeah. That was just before I was involved.
Michael Meyers: [00:18:49] And the security team is a secret cabal.
Kat Shaw: [00:18:54] Yeah.
Michael Meyers: [00:18:56] And rightfully so, but, thank you for demystifying that, cause I, you know, I don't know that everybody understands how Drupal comes together. You know, all these working groups, the collaboration, you know, there is a tremendous amount of thought, like, you know, that accessibility working group and team that's involved in, you know, Drupal core and this initiative.
So it's great to hear that there's a lot of people focused on this.
Kat Shaw: [00:19:21] Yeah, I'd say if anybody wants to get involved with the key ways to get involved, or obviously to go to the project page, there's links on the project page for Olivero and Claro. And Claro is in core. So, but you could still find the project page for Claro.
There's several other pages for Claro that help; and then after that, Slack is the number one way, Drupal's Slack page has rooms for those as well. So you can get involved very easily. Drupal 9 has a meeting on Mondays, Monday mornings at 9:30 Central? I think, no, 9 Central, so bad, for the front end theme.
So if you want to get involved in those and help out, you can definitely be involved in this very open. So just, you know, definitely hit me up or hit anybody else up. And most definitely we'd love to have volunteers and help have people help out.
Michael Meyers: [00:20:17] Great. Can you take us through a quote unquote day, you know, you know, it would be awesome in the lens of an example to, you know, get a sense of, you know, how you do your work on this.
You know, can you kind of walk us through that?
Kat Shaw: [00:20:33] Yeah. I mean, when I'm able to work on it, it's I should say, do you mean like a day, a general day altogether? Or do you mean that, that day on these.
Michael Meyers: [00:20:48] I'm sure that you do work over many days. that's what I meant sort of like, you know, end to end, you know, you mentioned earlier how, you know, you're, you're looking through and you're reviewing designs and you're finding, you know, maybe you could talk us through that a little bit, you know, you know, the details of that process.
Kat Shaw: [00:21:08] Sure. Yeah. like I said, I started a little bit later, you know, after they had done it, but I do know that when it comes to like the design process at the very beginning, the key stakeholders gave feedback. So as I was mentioning, you know, that would be even Dries. Lowery is his name, Angie Byron, Christina, and Gabor. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. So that would be the group that gave feedback on the designs. They had several designs and they whittled it down to one, and then they worked with their specific groups on, On getting those designs worked out . For the Olivero team.
They actually went and created a proof of concept. Mike created a proof of concept that was just HTML and CSS. And then. Tried to make that accessible and, and fix a bunch of the issues on that site. And then once that was done in, I think that was GitHub. Then we moved that onto a Drupal and created a theme off of that.
For Claro, it was a bit different. They created the whole theme on GitHub. And it went really fast from what I understand, because I wasn't involved in that initial part. And then, they also said that, Christina said that she got a lot of the buy-in from stakeholders at that point. And so that went really well.
When I got involved.,they had at that point, the design in Figma , which is a product that's pretty cool and we use that at Lullabot. It took like a web based tool that you can use for designs. And, actually it's, you know, linked on the project pages. So, collaborators and volunteers go to that and they can look at the design for the themes and get their feedback on what they think should change.
So when I was using that example earlier with the form fields and the, the error messages, that's what we did in that situation. So we went on there and just collaborated and, and. And reported tickets and, and gave our feedback on that on the ticket.
Michael Meyers: [00:23:19] It's not, it sounds very similar to how we, you know, at our agencies, build and work with our clients.
Kat Shaw: [00:23:27] Yeah. It's very similar.
Michael Meyers: [00:23:29] Okay. It just happens at a massive scale.
Kat Shaw: [00:23:33] Yeah. Yeah. It's like a, it's the same thing. It's just with a lot more employees who are, who mostly worked for free and yeah. So yeah, I'd say that.
Michael Meyers: [00:23:47] Cool. What's next? Like, what do you, what are you working on over the next couple of weeks, months?
Where do you see your focus?
Kat Shaw: [00:23:55] Well, I know that, you know, one of the things for me that was difficult to select this past year was, I was working on a, you know, I'm new. I just started at Lullabot in September of last year. It feels new and going to be a year and a couple of months. So when I started, I felt, you know, I had to work on my new, my first project and it felt kind of pressured to make sure to get those tickets done.
So once I had worked on these two projects for awhile, I had to get that project done and we actually just launched that last week. So, you know, now that I've done that I'm refocusing. My time on both of these and, focusing on accessibility specifically and fixing issues with both of those, trying to get them over the hump, but they might have. One of the other things that, I just met yesterday with Olivero team and we had an awesome meeting actually with the National Federation of the Blind.
It was really cool. It was kind of a last minute invite. And, I guess, the cool thing is they're going to help test Olivero, for us. And, I was very excited about that. And then after that meeting, I got asked if I could lead the team for testing. So I'm going to lead the team for coordinating the testing with the National Federation of the Blind. So it's a great opportunity and I'm very excited about it.
Michael Meyers: [00:25:23] That's amazing. Congratulations.
Kat Shaw: [00:25:26] Thank you. I'm very, very excited to work with them. They're very, very humble people. So very knowledgeable. Hi, it was really nice to meet them.
Michael Meyers: [00:25:37] I had a mind blowing experience recently.
You know, the, the internet, websites, it's like a core part of our lives. Like it's, it's impossible not to, you know, live without the internet. Like so much of what I do is online that you think about like people with disabilities that have, you know, either extreme challenges, you know, like show you, don't like a best case, lots of friction.
We were doing an accessibility review, on this intranet they were building and, you know, the, the advice of the team was when we were doing like, study for the blind and like turn off your monitor, you know? And I was like, well, you know, like navigate, you know, and it was, you know, it was an amazing experience.
It really, yeah. Yeah, it gave me a new perspective and it was that simple, you know, turn off your monitor or your, you know, turn down the screen brightness. So you can't see it.
Kat Shaw: [00:26:31] Turn off your mouse.
Michael Meyers: [00:26:32] Yeah. And, and, you know, I encourage everybody to try that, to get a sense or, you know, just a small sense of, you know, what people with disabilities have to do with, and it will really change your thinking and how you go about building websites and, and, and, you know, just give you a small sense of how important this is.
Kat Shaw: [00:26:49]
Absolutely. I haven't, you had a chance to participate in it, but I hope to in the future when things cool down eventually, but Deque actually has what they call an empathy lab. I think they call it, which is really cool where they have those kinds of things and they allow you to come in and you can use all of the different devices that people use.
So switch devices and, you know, screen readers and all of that kind of stuff so that you can see what it's like for people with disabilities. To use those things and to build empathy for people so that they can see what it's like to navigate your own site, using those things. And, you know, any developers can be like, wow, you know, that's not, it's not really great.
And yeah, I wanna fix that, you know, so it's, it's really important. And you know, for me, that's actually what happened to me back in 2012. So I worked at local government actually in, That's how I, how I got my start in all of it. So I worked at Douglas County, Kansas as a webmaster and, you know, obviously accessibility and local government go hand in hand.
And so I got, you know, some experience with it and I kinda thought I understood things and did a little bit here and there, but then I went and saw a speaker. He was, his name was Dan and he was, he worked for the GSA, as part of the Section 508 Group. And he did a presentation, from the point of view of.a blind user ,using a screen reader. It's the first time I'd ever heard of one. And it just like, it really blew my mind away. It was just amazing when I heard it. And I know it did that for everybody else in the room. And I just was changed forever from that. And I went right away back to the County, to my office and started looking all of it up and just making changes right away. And I haven't looked back from there at all. I mean, it's just ever since then, I just became an advocate and just wanted to learn as much as I could about it and make changes to our site. And so, you know, just right after that, actually I redid our main site and our intranet site because of that completely.
So, and really focused on, you know, developing with accessibility in mind instead of doing a site and then checking it for accessibility, which is what a lot of people do.
Michael Meyers: [00:29:15] That's a, it's amazing to see how you went from, you know, new to Drupal, to participating in two of the five strategic initiatives, like the most critical things behind the future of Drupal.
That's amazing for folks that are out there to see. You know, the trajectory and your opportunities to get involved. I'm curious, you know, like it's amazing how, how many people contribute to Drupal. It's one of the most active, open source projects. But like I said, they're not getting paid. You know, we have personal lives, we have family lives, you know, we have work lives.
What's it, you know, what do you like and, and dislike about, contributing to Drupal and, what do you wish you could change?
Kat Shaw: [00:30:00] I like sharing. Sharing's my number one thing that I like doing. I like it at work. I like it, when I had back in the day, when I used to go to Camps and Cons, and anything, it's so exciting.
I like to teach people. I like to learn. So those are the things I like to do. I like the community in Drupal. That's one of the things that I fell in love with. I love the teamwork. You know, and all of that. and I obviously, for me, making accessibility a top priority, is important and, and meeting other people that do that is very awesome.
So I get really geeky when that happens. In fact, I got really geeky when I was on that phone call yesterday, I had to just like, try to keep myself calm. And I was just like, have that opportunity to talk with the president of the NSB. So, I'd say what I don't like is people that are closed minded about accessibility.
So obviously on the flip side, you know, you might have clients that are like that. You might have developers that are like that because it takes, you know, learning some new things and they might not want to they're set in their ways and they don't really want to go there. and you know,
I
Michael Meyers: [00:31:14] understand the importance of it or.
Kat Shaw: [00:31:18] Yeah. You know, they don't have empathy and they, they just think of visual users. They're just visual. And so they'll create a beautiful site and they've worked so hard on it to be beautiful and work and you know, have all this flashy stuff, and then, you know, they don't want to hear that. Oh, well it doesn't work for blind users.
It's kind of like that Domino's case, you know, where Domino's had. You know, it was a great site or whatever, I don't know, but they didn't want to, you know, better their site for disabled users. And they actually went all the way, went to court to say we shouldn't have the, you know, Pixar site for disabled users.
You know, they ended up, they ended up losing, but whether or not they lost, or won or lost the fact that, you know, a company, would just say that and feel that way, just really bothered me. And there's people that feel that way. And so that bothers me a lot. And I, one
Michael Meyers: [00:32:16] The length of time it took it to take it to court, they would have spent a fraction on just making the website accessible.
Kat Shaw: [00:32:22] Exactly.
Michael Meyers: [00:32:23] I mean, you know, and if you are going to fight it, you know, why not do it?
Kat Shaw: [00:32:30] Yeah, it, it was pointless and it also is bad PR. I mean, I don't know who was thinking. That was a good idea at all. It was just not very good. And, and I'd also say that, you know, people that know they're really knowledgeable about accessibility, just make sure you're not coming across in a condescending way.
You know, really remember that people want to learn. and it's really important to remember that people are starting out just like we did at the very beginning. And we need to teach what we know and I'm still learning a lot. I'm not an, I'm not a complete expert. I am learning, everybody's learning. And so, always come to things in a humble way and always want to learn and always want to teach people.
Always want to share what you learn and always want to learn.
Michael Meyers: [00:33:23] It sounds like participating in these initiatives have, has been, you know, you know, an amazing learning and even career opportunity, you know, working with the association for the blind and all these different groups and getting access to these equipment, you know, it's, Yeah, a lot of that is out of reach for most people.
So my pitch would be, you know, the more you get involved, the more you're going to transform your career, you know, you're going to be more successful, make more money, do more interesting things. So it's definitely worthwhile to, to get involved. My hope is that, you know, these initiatives, you know, Claro, Olivero will solve the Domino's problem to some degree, right?
If, if Drupal's providing out of the box, these, you know, beautiful, functional and highly accessible systems, you know, you don't need to be an accessibility expert. You can just build on top of these themes and your site is going to be more accessible than most out on the internet.
Kat Shaw: [00:34:23] Yeah. And you know, it's actually interesting.
You mentioned that because in a meeting yesterday with Andrew MacPherson, I hope he doesn't mind me mentioning. He mentioned that he wants to dispel the myth that an accessible site is ugly. You know, it's, it can be a beautiful site and be an accessible site at the same time. A lot of people think that if you're going to make your site accessible, it's not, it's going to just be ugly.
You can have both.
Michael Meyers: [00:34:50] Yeah. And with Drupal, we take all the work out of it. Well, not all a lot of the work.
Kat Shaw: [00:34:54] Yeah,
Michael Meyers: [00:34:56] we create some other work perhaps, too, but, is fantastic. Any call to action is, you know, you know, these two initiatives that you're working on, you know, it sounds like there's a big community involved, but I'm sure that there's always room for, you know, and a desire to engage more people.
if, folks listening want to get involved, where do you guys need help?
Kat Shaw: [00:35:22] Well, yeah, absolutely. I'd say with each one of them, you know, I was mentioning their project pages, be the easiest way to find them. And if you go there, they're going to each have a Meta issue. That's going to have a bunch of sub issues linked off of them.
So for Olivero, it's, the Meta issue is called “add new Olivero front end theme to Drupal 9.1 core and eventually make it the default”. So it's a really long title, but the goal for that, for us is to get it, the must haves, done for beta, the beta release, and then the must haves for stable release.
And, I know that we were really focusing on senior reviews for the code quality. cause we do have a lot of great volunteers and we definitely appreciate getting more volunteers, but if we could get more senior reviews for the code quality and the accessibility, that would be really, really awesome.
Cause we have the goal to get into core. For Claro, you can find Claro again, it's in core, but there is a Meta ticket, called “Roadmap to Stabilize Claro”. And that has a bunch of sub tickets that are the real focus on getting it, I think stable actually, cause it's already in Experimental in Drupal core.
And so you would focus on the must haves for a better release and then the must haves for stable release. I know that, in meeting with the team, we are trying to focus on getting as much done on that, the must have list for the code release for October, 2020. and then, Yeah, our objective for both just to get more contributors and, you know, get as much done as we can.
Michael Meyers: [00:37:11] Well, I encourage people to get involved for the reasons that we mentioned, plus it's just an awesome group of people to work with. Shifting gears, our segment that we like to call and, And Now for Something New, as we wrap things up, everybody just takes a minute to talk about something interesting that they've discovered.
I'll let you go first Kat. What have you discovered recently that you want to share with folks that that is exciting?
Kat Shaw: [00:37:35]
Well, I'd like to share this tool that I saw, actually DrupalCon's Global Virtual Conference. I, took a session as well for live captioning and it was really a great session.
And so if you go to live-captioning.com, you can find it. And it's really an amazing tool. It's basically, what they're trying to do is create a reliable no cost tool that makes speaking events more accessible than they normally are. They're not trying to replace, you know, the interpreters, I guess they call them CART.
I had never heard of it before, but CART stands for Communication Access Real-time Translation, but that's pretty cool. They're just trying to offer an alternative for people that don't have the option for live captioning in meetings and, and can have that option. So it's pretty cool. and if you go to that website again, live-captioning.com.
I think it is, you can click on, see the tool in action and when you get to that, there's a link to how to use and delegate the steps on how to use the tool. And it's pretty simple, but, yeah, I definitely recommend it. It was really. It was really awesome. Also I would check out DrupalCon's site and look up that session.
And you can probably find out more about that there. And when they finally get the video for the session, I would definitely check it out. Cause I'm sure that will help you to understand how to use it.
Michael Meyers: [00:39:09] Yeah, that sounds amazing. Even for people that aren't struggling with sight issues. I know like my wife loves to watch TV with closed captioning on, you know, having this, you know, for a meeting in zoom. Like we are right now. It helps internalize right. And helps learn. a lot of people, you know, reading is a really effective way. And then of course, for people with disabilities, it's critical. So it's, you know, having that tool would, would make, you know, participating in work and in conference sessions and in life so much easier.
I definitely want to check that out.
Kat Shaw: [00:39:38]
I would like to thank Andy Olsen and Qymana Botts, for doing that presentation because it was very good. They did a really great job. So hopefully I get to meet them in person one day.
Michael Meyers: [00:39:50] Yeah, I'd love to, maybe we should have them on the show. I'd love to talk about the technology underlying that it's gotta be pretty cool stuff.
Kat Shaw: [00:39:57] Yeah. It looks like it is. So we'll have to ask them that too.
Michael Meyers: [00:40:02] Well, less worldly, solving a problem. I wanted to talk about an app that I discovered recently called Planta it's PLA N T A, I do not have a green thumb and I regularly struggle in keeping our house plans going. And I, we, you know, we love to have plants around the house and it's, you know, it's been frustrating. So this has really improved the mortality rate, of our ....
Kat Shaw: [00:40:27] I love it.
Michael Meyers: [00:40:31] Yeah, it's so cool. It has a, you know, you set up different rooms and the lighting conditions and you know, of course I didn't save the little stickers or, or like flags that come with the plants. I've no idea what it is. you know, and you take a photo of it and it tells you like what plant it is.
And it's like, you know, this is not a good fit for the room that you have it in, you know, just in part why it's dying. Yeah. You know, like, you know, I don't know why it's Yellow or Brown. Is it water? Is it light? You know, who knows? But, you know, it also blew my mind because like what you pot it in and the kind of, you know, like has certain like, you know, breathability, terracotta versus plastic versus glass or whatever, whether or not there's drainage, like there are all these things that asked you about a plant that I never really, you know, as a plant.
And I really thought about these things.
Kat Shaw: [00:41:16] Yeah. Just put them in dirt and they should grow, but yeah, that's, that's really cool. I'm going to have to check that out. I'm a gardener. So I love gardening, but it's weird inside plants are a lot harder to grow for me than outside plants. So I'm with you on that.
Michael Meyers: [00:41:31] Gardening is a future goal. I don't, I don't think it does that, but, it likes to send you lots of reminders that I ignore, like, you know, spray your plants, I didn't know you're supposed to wipe plants clean every once in a while. You know, I just thought they lived.
Kat Shaw: [00:41:47] I have two dead plants up there that I could have used that app for. So I'm not going to show them, but I should finally remove them from my office.
Michael Meyers: [00:41:57] Awesome. Well, Kat, thank you so much for joining us today. That was, that was amazing. It was really interesting. I hope folks are gonna check out, you know, the links in the show notes, the tools that you mentioned, you know, try turning down the brightness on your screen and checking it out and see what other people go through.
And, you know, Contribute, you know, jump in and see how you can help with these accessibility issues, initiatives, you know, and, you know, a key part of what is the future of Drupal improving the backend and front end user interfaces.
So also a big thank you to everybody who is watching and listening. As I mentioned, all of the links are going to be in the show notes.
If you like this talk, please upvote, subscribe, share it out. And help us build our audience. You know, it's been really rewarding to see more and more viewers with each, video and podcasts that we post. So again, thank you. You can check out our past Tag Team Talks at tag1.com/tagteamtalks.
We also started a new series that I'm excited about, called Core Confidential at tag1.com/core. And this is where we have, you know, the top core contributors, the core maintainers, framework managers, come in and talk about what's been going on over the past 30 days in Drupal, from the security announcements and like digging into those , to you know, new features and functionality that are coming down the line to the process of core development. So it's fascinating to get insight into all of that. As always we'd love your feedback, topic suggestions, you can reach out to us, a tagteamtalks@tag1consulting.com. We really appreciate you joining us and we'll see you next time. Thanks.