Talk:Groups/Proposals/Accessibility Tracking

Previous page history was archived for backup purposes at Talk:Groups/Proposals/Accessibility Tracking/LQT Archive 1 on 2015-07-10.

Thank you for your interest in furthering the Wikimedia goals as a user group focused on accessibility tracking.

I would like to ask a few questions to have all the relevant information in one place (one-two sentence or paragraph summaries or links to other pages are fine), which we use to get to know you better and to have a catalogue of all affiliates as we ask all of them a very similar set of questions. Please know, that there are no "expected" or wrong answers.

• Who are the people behind this application?
  • How many?
  • any active (on local or international level) Wiki[pm]edians, MediaWiki developers? (please provide user names and wiki of origin)
  • Active in which communities if any?
  • How are they geographically distributed?
• Could you give a short overview of the time path of the founding up to now?
• Have there been any activities/meetings etc. of this group of people?
• What kind of activities are planned for the future?
• Are your activities focused on one specific project, or a specific language version?

• Do you have 2 contact persons who would be willing to sign the meta:Wikimedia_User_Group_Agreement for the group?
• For how long do you request the user group recognition? (The default is a renewable one year term; I expect in your case it would also be "1 year")

Thank you for your time in answering these questions. These help us get a feel for your group and allows us to move forward with the recognition process quickly.

I can readily answer your questions in a few lines.

• The core people behind the application are members of the Swiss foundation «Access for all», see link under "Related" and partners of the TAO project, especially students and employees of ‚Bern Universtiy of Applied Sciences‘.
• The important thing to know is that the goal of this group is to broaden the circle of contributors for accessibility concerns worldwide. We still are looking for new contributors, so by networking activities at the Wikimania in HK.
• Hence, the User Group shall serve as an information and coordination platform for all kinds of activities regarding accessibility improvements of MediaWiki and Wikipedia.
  • How many?: See the hopefully constantly growing number of Contributors. To date, the large portion of work on the Group was done by myself. Hope this will change.
  • For sure to mention RexxS, Dodoïste, Alolita Sharma, Sharihareswara (WMF). All of these people have already been into accessibility. Beat Estermann engaged in the TAO project.
  • Active: in WMF, Wikipedia, Wikimedia, ...
  • Geographical distribution: UK, F, US, CH, ...
• Timepath, not sure what this question is about. From my point of view until after the upcoming networking activities we are still in the founding phase of the group. History of documents and tools:
  • German Wikipedia test report: July 2011
  • Wikipedia skin prototype for seniors: 2012
  • Accessibility checklist for authors and publishers: 2012
  • Content Accessibility Checker CAC, prototype: 2013
  • Set up of Group Proposal page: April 2013
  • TO-DO list based on test report: April 2013
  • Link to CAC original release: coming soon
• Past meeting: No meetings, but informal activities within the TAO project
• Future activities: Coordination and information about accessibility concern on MediaWiki and Wikipedia
• Language focus: There is no focus on any language or location in the future, while the original test report was based on the German Wikipedia
• Agreement: Myself for sure and I can assure to convince another person for this commitment
• Duration: 1 year

Hope my answers to satisfiy your requirements. Best regards

Hi Barrierefrei,

Thanks for the replies. I think your group is going to handle a very important issue, and I am happy that there are people paying attention to this.

Are you planning to have some activities at Wikimania, perhaps at the Hackathon specifically aimed at accessibility?

I'll ask my fellow AffCom members, but I think in general your group will meet the requirements, we do need though there to be a bit of a community, so perhaps if you could convince a few more people to help you (and one of them to co-sign the agreement, so that we know the formailities are met), then we would be happy to provide the official recognition.

Best regards,

Hi Bdamokos,

Thank you for your reply. And thank you for tipps. I will do my best! And let you know as soon as I succeeded!

Best regards

I have a question concerning the proposed approach. Three major Wikipedias have their own set of accessibility guidelines. They are far from perfect, but in their imperfections they reflect the current status of the collaboration between accessibility promoters and the community. I mean to say that some accessibility guidelines may be purposefully imperfect. Because the perfect solution was disliked by the community, or because its implementation placed too much burden on editors, or because editors made too many mistakes while following a complex guideline.

How the proposed guidelines here will interact with local guidelines?

Another fundamental question would be "how much importance will we give to software improvements". Notably those that would make it easier for editors to create accessible content. This option has been neglected by both us and the WMF im the past. What priority will we give to the software approach ?

Thank you very much for this reference. If you know the respective contacts, I'd appreciate very much if you could inform them of this Group (Proposal). I will track this issue later on. thank you

The problem addressed in 1.3.2.1 has already been solved. The extensible headings now have the structurally correct <h3> tags as well as <a> tags to have screen readers describe these as links.

Changed the traffic light symbol right now. Thank you very much Kai.

I have a few notes about some of the stuff in the tables.

1.3 - Problem B 1b: Listings and lists: CSS-class

Why does something this domain specific have to be tackled within MediaWiki? As long as the right elements are used in the pages instead of abusing something like tables all this takes is the css. I don't see anything that makes this something that can't simply be solved with the right css in the community.

We already had a bug on adding horizontal list css to core at bug 40062 and I've already explained the problems with i18n when you try to include this as part of the core software.

1.3 - Problem D 1: Semantically correct markup - layout tables:

This doesn't have to be a total no-no. At the very least layouts that are impossible to markup without tables should at least have role="presentation" set on them.

2.4.7 - Problem 2: Skip links

This should have already been fixed. Skip links aren't completely invisible to users. When you tab through the links the skip links are visible whenever focused.

The only problem with them is there seem to be tabindexes that make a bunch of other links like the sidebar headers and central notice messages show up before the skip links when they shouldn't. That and the css that central notice uses screws with the skip links making the notice overlap the skip links.

3.1.2 - Problem 1: Foreign-language parts – CSS class

We do have markup for declaring language, the standard lang="" and dir="" attributes. The only thing the new editor has to do is make it easier for users to add. VisualEditor will have to especially consider this. Since once you jump into WYSIWYG all metadata on language disappears completely from view.

I think the general accessibility information here belongs to a specific page, either m:Accessibility or a successor for it.