Last month at DrupalCon Global, Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, announced that a major focus of Drupal 9 will be improving the user interface and user experience of the platform - for all personas. Two of the five D9 Strategic Initiatives have been dedicated to making this happen. The “New Front-End Theme Initiative” or user interface (UI) for Drupal, also known as the Olivero Theme, covers the end-user experience. The “Admin UI & JavaScript Modernisation Initiative”, also known as the Claro Admin theme covers site builders, managers, and administrators.

A critical component of improving the experience for all users is accessibility. In this episode of Tag1TeamTalks, Michael Meyers (Managing Director, Tag1) talks with Kat Shaw (Senior Front-end Developer, Lullabot), a CPACC-certified accessibility expert working on both initiatives.

Join us for a tour and overview of both themes, get unique insight into the development process and inner workings of strategic initiatives, learn about the accessibility improvements, and find out how all these benefit you and your Drupal sites (hint: your sites become a lot more accessible, for free, with little effort on your part).

Both initiatives carry over from D8 and have been under development for some time. In Drupal 9.0, Claro, the new admin theme, is available in beta as an optional theme you can enable today. It is slated to become the default admin theme in the upcoming D9.1 release. You can also try the new front-end theme, Olivero, hands-on, by downloading and installing it from Drupal.org. It will likely be part of Core in the upcoming D9.1 release as an optional theme that you can enable, and will hopefully be the default theme in Drupal 9.2.