Accessibility resources

Discussions
#1

Today in Forge Federation general the subject of accessibility came up with a notice, that there is a knowledge gap in the community.

I happen to have some experience in the area (and even trained some colleagues). It’s a wide subject, so one can specialise in this niche :slight_smile:
My personal focus is on the hard-of-hearing community for reasons but I know enough to share some guidelines.

Test with disabled people

There are tooling, but they can get you only so far. According to this report, you can find almost 60 % of issues using automated solutions:

https://www.deque.com/automated-accessibility-testing-coverage/

This is focussing on WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) - that is, digital accessibility on the web.

That being said, real people will tell you things that you would miss otherwise. UX Research shows yet again its value.

Tooling

Deque’s aXe core is becoming a de-facto standard in the industry.
I personally use WAVE for a first evaluation:

https://wave.webaim.org/

(To be continued, thanks to limitation to two links per post for new accounts…)

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#2

I want to continue with some „convince others” resources.

Believe it or not, but Microsoft made quite a good case with their Inclusive Design initiative:

https://www.microsoft.com/design/inclusive/

It highlights, that accessibility can benefit more than just the narrow group you have in mind. Inclusiveness focusses more on the people, though (and less on the tooling).

If you need a repeating reminder, printing the Accessibility posters by UK Home Office might be a good start:

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#3

Most developers will think of screenreaders when it comes to accessibility. And they play an important part! WHO has some numbers on it:

If you use an Android or iOS device, you can use the built-in screenreader for testing web apps:

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#4

Discourse is great: Asking me to write one long post instead of many smaller ones.
I would love to! If I could include more links …

Anyway, if you look for more hands-on documentation I can recommend UK Home Office again:

Plus, the W3C WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) curates APG (Authoring Practices Guide) in case you have to use ARIA (Accessibility Rich Interface Applications):

I think, I will leave it at this for now.

Do you have some specific topic I can help with? Perhaps create a new one and link this there so we can have some high level overview here.

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#5

You now have elevated permissions.

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#6

The first thing that comes to mind is to pick one accessibility problem in Gitea and fix it. You’ve already explored this space IIRC and now that there is going to be a fork it may be easier to

  • document accessibility good practices for developers to follow
  • lead the way by example

this is not federation specific but pave the way for when federation UI will be worked on.

Does that answer your question or did you have something else in mind?

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#7

No, that’s exactly what I had in mind.

If we have a blog at some point, the process could be described as well.

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