Project Outline

The BLE, as the overall IT provider to the German Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection, is running many websites on TYPO3.  As a governmental agency, the BLE is required to make all websites fully accessible according to the German accessibility guidelines (BITV). This often requires special configuration and extension of TYPO3, a cumbersome process requiring manual effort for each installation.

The BLE wanted all changes to be integrated into the TYPO3 Core so that they would not have to manually patch the TYPO3 Core for their installations and, as a side effect, all other users of the Open Source product TYPO3 benefit as well from the improvements. For these reasons, it made sense for the BLE to work closely together with the TYPO3 project itself.

The project comprises of a range of subprojects, including a project to make the TYPO3 Core frontend output accessible (according to various accessibility guidelines including WCAG and the BITV), further development of the file abstraction layer (in order to provide central metadata management out of the box), an accessible image gallery, accessibility improvements of various extensions, and the creation of a government-focused package of TYPO3 shipping an accessibility-optimized default configuration of TYPO3.

All in all, the project will be a boost to the development of TYPO3 v4, bringing it even further in conformance with accessibility standards, and making it even easier to manage assets and metadata within TYPO3.

Related Forge projects

If you want to watch the activity within the BLE project, have a look into the following projects on TYPO3 Forge:

Join the Project

If you would like to join any of the projects on a voluntary basis, you are very welcome on all of the teams. In general, the concepts of functionality to be implemented will be worked on in some public space either on Forge or in the relevant project mailing lists, but you can also contact the individual developers to be included in the efforts.