Joshue O Connor wrote up a very helpful guide to the back-end accessibility of 10 content management systems at Juicy Studios. The goal of the article, Choosing an Accessible CMS, was to identify a CMS with a highly accessible back end which would allow users with disabilities and minimal HTML knowledge to maintain a website.

This isn’t a highly scientific, detailed set of user trials for the content management systems — - but the study certainly gives a general sense of what systems you can probably just ignore altogether and which systems are worth pursuing.

The content management systems tested were:

  • Jadu
  • Mambo
  • Joomla
  • Quick and Easy
  • Expression Engine
  • Plone
  • Drupal
  • Textpattern
  • Xoops
  • Typo3

Somewhat surprisingly, Wordpress wasn’t checked. I know from experience that the back end of Wordpress is nowhere near as good as the front end; and I haven’t personally done any accessibility testing on it, so I’d have certainly been interested to see what Joshue had to say.

At any rate, if you’re either looking to select a CMS to implement regularly or if you use one of these systems, you may well find the article a very interesting read.