mod_accessibility

Basic Installation

These basic instructions should be sufficient to install and run mod_accessibility. Further details are provided below, but can be ignored for a basic installation.

Download mod_accessibility, and install it in your modules directory.
If you don't already have libxml2, download and install it (eg as /usr/local/lib/libxml2.so).

Configure Apache to load libxml2 and mod_accessibility at startup. Add the following to httpd.conf:


LoadFile	/usr/local/lib/libxml2.so
LoadModule	accessibility_module	modules/mod_accessibility.so

Configure Apache to filter documents with mod_accessibility. For example, to apply it to static HTML documents, use
```
AddOutputFilter	accessibility	.html
```

For more information about the configuration, see the Apache manual. The above requires only standard Apache directives that should be familiar to any server administrator.

Advanced Configuration

Details to follow

Recommended Configuration

It is recommended that you always give your users a choice of whether or not to filter your pages. There are many ways to accomplish this, but the simplest way is to make your documents available at different URLs with and without mod_accessibility configured.

For example, if your server is http://www.example.org/, you could leave that as-is, but configure another virtual server at http://access.example.org/, with identical configuration but with the addition of an AddOutputFilter directive. You could then offer a simple link to each site from the other.

Relationship with other Output Filters

mod_accessibility should be inserted in the output filter chain after any other modules used for content generation - such as mod_include (SSI/.shtml) or XSLT - but before any encoding filters such as mod_gzip or mod_deflate, or of course mod_ssl (secure HTTP encryption), or mod_cache. Apache will take care of the latter automatically, but you need to ensure that it comes after other contents filters.

Good Examples

(mod_accessibility works well after other content filters).


AddOutputFilter INCLUDES,accessibility	.shtml

or

AddOutputFilter modxml-xslt	.xml
AddOutputFilter accessibility	.xml

Bad Examples

(mod_accessibility should not normally be used before other content filters).


AddOutputFilter accessibility,INCLUDES	.shtml

or

AddOutputFilter accessibility	.xml
AddOutputFilter modxml-xslt	.xml

Character Sets and Internationalisation

(Under construction - you can probably safely ignore this).

If your server is correctly configured before you add mod_accessibility, it should work correctly (although we don't have the capability to test this). However, a minor error in your configuration, or a sloppy CGI or PHP script, may cause unexpected results. In technical terms, you should ensure that the charset parameter is set in your Content-Type header.

mod_accessibility generates utf-8 (unicode) output. This should be suitable for most servers, as it is supported by browsers, and supports a very wide range of character sets. If you want to generate a different character set, you can do it by inserting another filter, such as mod_charset or mod_charset_lite, after mod_accessibility.