Accessibility pledge

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cboyden's picture

Accessibility tag: #DAX or similar?

Wording of accessibility tag: “I pledge to make [this module or theme] as accessible as it can be.” With a link to a drupal.org page on accessibility.

What the pledge means: The developer commits to evaluating their module or theme; fixing critical issues found during evaluation; adding accessibility improvements into future development; and responding to accessibility issues if they are filed. The developer should consider the user experience of administrators, content creators, and site visitors.

Resources for module and theme developers: At Berkeley we developed our Top Ten Tips and evaluation rubric – if these are useful resources, we could link to them. They focus on a subset of WCAG that we found most useful, either because they’re the problems we saw most often in our clinics, or they’re relatively easy to implement. See http://webaccess.berkeley.edu/evaluating.php and http://webaccess.berkeley.edu/developer-tips.php. (We have an ongoing project to link the rubric criteria back to the WCAG and 508 guidelines that they line up with.)

Comments

more examples of 'Top Ten Tips'

bowersox's picture

@oedipus shared more examples:

A quick overview of important a11y considerations:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/glance/

A longer detailed primer we could link off to:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/Resources/

A pledge of commitment

bowersox's picture

After a productive IRC discussion, the conclusion was that a pledge is roughly like Cliff said: "I've done my best to make this accessible. If you find any flaws, let me know. Help me fix them if you can."

@mgifford shared an example of what this would look like on a drupal.org project page: http://drupal.org/project/earth_hour

Wiki page

cboyden's picture

Please edit the wiki page:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/66323

Accessibility Checklist

cousett's picture

This is the checklist that we use for competitions for Knowbility it might be a good starting place for our own Drupal Accessibility Checklist - right now its in an excel document but it should be an accessible document AIR Judging Form there is also a checklist on WebAIM which might be a good resource Evaluating Web Site Accessibility

where is the responsibility

greggles's picture

The current wiki says:

What the pledge means: The developer commits to evaluating their module or theme

I think most developers believe their modules are accessible and just don't know about the problems. So, I suggest that we rephrase this. Perhaps:

What the pledge means: The developer commits to evaluating proposed changes tagged with #DAX;...

Much like the push for better translatability that Sony/Civicactions undertook a while ago, it's about educating the module maintainers about the problems as much as a marketing movement.

Who will do the tagging?

Cliff's picture

@greggles, I agree that this approach would be informative, but who will be reviewing all these modules and themes and tagging proposed changes with #DZAX? Does any one of us have the time?

Great Start

mgifford's picture

@cboyden thanks for starting the wiki.

@cousett I like the idea of putting up some custom page like the WebAim one you linked to that has steps for evaluation. I don't think a more complex form is going to be something that developers will use. It does have to be simple & clear what the problems are.

@greggles I tried to incorporate your suggestion into the wiki. Thanks for your insights on i18n improvements in D6. I think that there are a lot of similarities. Having been involved in trying to make bilingual Drupal 4.x sites I can appreciate how far it has come. Having basic i18n in core did a great deal to expand acceptance of the use of t() in Drupal contributions. I didn't know about the efforts with Sony/CivicActions to lobby module maintainers about this issue. It's definitely a huge educational effort. And folks have to see the benefits for themselves. I do wonder how many people will look at drag/drop problems differently because they just bought an iPad and are trying to edit some content on their site. I did it on my iPhone as a test earlier this week.

List of modules/themes to approach

mgifford's picture

Ok, we don't have the wording down pat yet. We need to settle on an hash tag for this initiative & verify that it isn't something already used on Twitter.

I thought I'd take a hack at producing that list of critical modules/themes in Drupal that we need to get to sign the pledge -> http://groups.drupal.org/node/66383

Now I don't think we need to get 50 to sign it, but we certainly should be approaching the top 10 personally. I'm also interested in knowing what modules/themes are being developed by the #a11y community that we can have take the pledge too. The example I posted about Earth Hour is mostly a goofy example as not many folks are using it now. I'll do a review of it and stick to the pledge, but there must be some other low fruit that we can add to the pile of modules that can sign the pledge. It's good to have the central modules, but it would be good if we had few others using it even before we start approaching the core module maintainers.

Hashtag suggestion

Cliff's picture

How about #D7AxS? It doesn't seem to be used right now; after the pledge is ironed out, we could reuse it for other accessibility initiatives.

Definitions

mgifford's picture

Hey Cliff,

Can you define these options in the wiki? http://groups.drupal.org/node/66323

We've got 3 options, but you've added 3 more D7AxS DZAX

To some extent the acronym doesn't matter. It's more important that we don't loose momentum on this idea.

Puzzled about the direction

Cliff's picture

I agree, Mike. I night be misunderstanding, but it seems that @greggles is proposing that we go out and flag problems with a hashtag. The hashtags proposed before are for developers to add to their site when they make the pledge.

If I understand @greggles' thought, do we all agree that we want to take that approach?

And if I've misunderstood, straighten me out. Please!

mgifford's picture

I do think that there's going to need to be outreach to get even just the top 10 project maintainers to pledge. However, I don't think @greggles was aiming to get us to tag all accessibility challenges... He just talked about the outreach that Sony/CiviActions needed to do for i18n.

outreach and finding and tagging

greggles's picture

I do think it will require some outreach, but not much. As I tried to say, I believe most maintainers agree with the goal of making their modules accessible.

However, finding the issues is not something that every maintainer can do. Or at least it's not something that I am knowledgable enough to do on my own.

By the way, I just updated the Pathauto and token project pages to include this pledge - when we decide on a tag I will of course update it.

Regarding "who" will actually do the work I think we approach it like every big task in open source: piece by piece ;)

Let's go with it!

Cliff's picture

Mike, I like the tag you used with the Earth Hour module: #D7AX.

Greg, thanks for clarifying. It will take some work to identify all issues. And in some ways, accessibility is relative — your content or tool can be accessible under all the circumstances you tested for, but then one day someone whose situation you couldn't anticipate finds out it doesn't work for them. So we're going to have to depend on developers who feel unsure of the accessibility of their contribs to ask for help figuring that out, as well as on others to gracefully offer input when they identify problems.

Could use other folks appealing for pledges

mgifford's picture

Hey folks,

I've appealed to a few folks, but need to have others ask developers to sign up for the pledge. I initially tried in Google to find this info:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=inurl%3Adrupal.org%2Fproject+%23d7ax

But @greggles pointed me to the much better Solr approach to find #D7ux pledges:

This once again proves that Solr is cool!

I'm not sure where else to talk it up, we need to take a few other approaches.