Talk:Accessibility

Accessibility
Adi: Wikipedia is, in general, quite accessible.

Tables are NOT accessible. Tables should appear as a list as much as possible.

HTML markup: Headings are sometimes not represented properly. Headings are important for the blind. For searching, the site, too. Search suggestions recently became accessible.

Search box - says the shortcut ("Alf-F") twice.

The edit link is marked up as a heading, and it shouldn't be. The heading must be subject only, without blank spaces and without the "edit" link.

Accessibility wishlist posted by User:Graham87, an awesome wikipedian visually impaired

Check out http://www.wikimedia.org.au//wiki/User:Graham87/Accessibility_wishlist

Would be awesome if the bugs could be fixed

"Contents" must be heading level 2.

Toolbox - it cannot be clicked and we don't know what is there under the link, because it's not actually a hyperlink. The same for Print/Export.

Brandon: Could it be solved by using an accessible skin?

Adi: Yes. It's the right way to go. The current skin was designed for sighted people. You don't have to change the whole website.

Brandon: Do you have an account? Do you edit?

Adi: No, i'm afraid to be wrong.

In general Wikipedia does a great job, i wish all websites were like that.

In the JAWS screen reader package, there's a feature called "Research", which gets info from Wikipedia. After you create an accessible skin, you should speak to the JAWS manufacturers and tell them to use it.

Kinzler: we had a project with DZB, some of them are fixed...

Adi: Tab order is fixed.

Kinzler: Image descriptions are read twice?..

Adi: Yes, they are still read twice.

What should be read? - the caption or the "alt"? If the caption is good, there's no need for "alt".

Turning a table to dt/dd would be useful.

What if the HTML would actually say DD and CSS would turn it into a page?

Amir: What do other sites do about tables?

Kinzler: They suck. Handling tables is really bad everywhere.

Idea: Having a "change skin" button.

Idea (Daniel): separate wiki markup for tables that are actually structural tabular data and different markup for lists.

Adi: Blind people usually use regular browsers and not text browsers like Lynx. Lynx is useful for other things, for example running without JavaScript. Blind SW devs do use Lynx for development.

NVDA is great. Adi localized its interface for Hebrew, but it still needs the grammar module. The prices are huge. Windows only.

Linux: SpeakUp, LSR, BLINUX.

Adi doesn't know any blind Wikipedia editors, but there are editors in other countries.

The registration form for Wikimania is very bad for accessibility!! Amir already talked about it to Aude, and Adi should talk to Jeremy Baron. Firefox makes it easier - it has an addon that essentially breaks the CAPTCHA. (Maybe the CAPTCHA should just be removed if it can be broken so easily.)

(captcha is unnecessary if people are paying anyway? could have a captcha that's explicitly optional and a note after submission telling people that didn't fill the captcha to send a short (e.g. 1 sentence) email with registration # and explain why they didn't fill the captcha (and give another offer to fill it in at that point))

Impractical idea
At #tech I made the dumb suggestion of enlarging the tick, or single-quote, character, in order to ease composition of wikibolding and wikiitalicizing, and debugging "wrong" rendering when it occurs. In my experience, one stray ' in a paragraph with a lot of wikibolding and wikiitalics _really_ messes things up, to the point of "oh, man, I have to strip out every single ' to find out why this is rendering so wonky." Then I see that the prose looks better without bold or ital. Ways to deal with it:
 * Javascript inline styling
 * Font substitution, with specially resized '
 * Use "ctrl +", like everybody else.

--Lexein (talk) 18:10, 6 November 2012 (UTC)