Talking Drupal #544 - World Cancer Day

Today we are talking about World Cancer Day, how they use Drupal, and why Drupal was the right choice with our guests Charles Andrew Revkin & Diego Costa. We'll also cover PDFa11y as our module of the week.

For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/544

Topics

• What Is World Cancer Day
• Why UICC Uses Drupal
• Diego Joins the Project
• Multilingual Strategy at Scale
• Drupal Architecture and AI Tools
• Vetting AI Moderation and Summaries
• AI Disclosure and Review
• Traffic Spikes and Scaling
• Drupal Stack and React Apps
• Campaign Theme United by Unique
• Yearly Content and Three Year Cycle
• Drupal Community and Open Access
• Custom AI Modules and Azure
• Future Improvements and AI Tagging
• Story Submission Formats
• Prevention PSA and Wrap Up

Resources

• World Cancer Day
• Union for International Cancer Control

Guests

Diego Costa - 1xinternet.com diegofcosta
Charles Andrew Revkin - worldcancerday.org revkin

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Steve Wirt - civicactions.com Swirt

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to check PDF files for accessibility, as they're uploaded to your Drupal site? There's a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • PDFa11y
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Feb 2026 by Joshua Mitchell (joshuami), a friend of this podcast
  • Versions available: 1.0.1, which works with Drupal 10.2 and 11
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage in process
  • Test coverage
  • Number of open issues: none
• Usage stats:
  • 0 sites
• Module features and usage
  • With the PDFa11y module installed, you can set its configuration, including whether to enable or disable automatic checking on upload, whether to block uploads that fail checks or just show warnings, a minimum PDF version requirement, and which accessibility checks to run
  • The module also sets creates three new permissions, Administer PDF accessibility settings, Run PDF accessibility checks, and View PDF accessibility report
  • Each PDF media item has an "Accessibility" tab where anyone with the necessary permissions can view the check results
  • Under the hood PDFa11y uses the smalot/pdfparser library to extract data from PDF files
  • Many sites rely on PDFs to make available content that they aren't able to migrate directly into Drupal content, so making sure that doesn't introduce its own accessibility regressions is an important step