Beside my daily work at Mayflower GmbH/ThinkPHP I’m working a lot on XHTML/CSS/Accessibilty for the open source project phpMyFAQ and trying to add my knowledge in our projects. Because accessibility wasn’t a goal in the previous releases of PHProjekt we’re working hard on the complete XHTML/CSS rewrite of the frontend.

The first major change of PHProjekt 5.0 will be the move from a frame based page layout to a clean XHTML/CSS valid design. To avoid major visual changes for the average user we’re using fixed positioning which looks similar to frames. The whole layout and design for the skins will be managed by CSS and tables will only be used to display tabular data and not for layout reasons.

The goal for next versions beginning with PHProjekt 5.0 we’re aiming to get in compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. The German BITV (Barrierefreie Informationstechnik-Verordnung) is compatible with the WCAG 1.0 and will be the rule for every state-run internet and intranet page by the end of 2005.