User:Dodoïste/Draft letter to WMF

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Request to the WMF from the accessibility project[edit]

Athena's live notification system is using visual signals to indicate a new message. How will blind people get it? This is a good example of our limits as volunteers from the accessibility projects: we can only guess there is a problem, and we do not know how it should be fixed. Only accessibility professionals are able to find a suitable solution for these kinds of complex issues.

Dear Wikimedia Foundation,

We are members of the English WikiProject Accessibility. Our aim is to make Wikipedia accessible to people with disabilities, such as blindness or motor impairment.

We request that new features released on Wikimedia projects are made to be accessible to people with disabilities. Currently, some accessibility issues are being fixed trough bug reports from the community. (several problems not noticed, incomplete bug reports, developers left with imprecise information cannot solve issues correctly) conclusion: this system does not work. The WMF needs a strategy to find and fix accessibility issues on its own.

Wikipedia is currently quite accessible[edit]

Wikipedia has already a fairly good level of accessibility for disabled readers.[note 1] This is mostly because the Web technologies used in Wikipedia are few and made in a very functional way. For example, there is almost no video, little use of sounds, little use of graphs and animations, no Flash, no use of AJAX and other dynamic technologies, and so on. The average article contains text, links, headings, a few images and tables: it's very simple.

The challenge is to keep Wikipedia accessible[edit]

Wikipedia is evolving. The WikiMedia Foundation (WMF) have deployed some new features recently (starting with the Vector skin), and is planning to release much more (WYSYWIG editing tools, interactive features like article feedback, notification system, etc.). These are using interactive interfaces such as AJAX, and introduce advanced tools to interact with the website.

  • In the case of the Vector skin, the left navigation menu
  • what does not work (bug reports, our limits to provide advice and report bugs, limits of developers to fix issues after release, limits of knowledge about accessibility from the side of developers)
  • examples of complex issues with new features
  • what we need

We would like for the WMF to show that accessibility is taken into account in the development process. We wish for the new features to be fairly accessible, so that they will maintain Wikipedia's reputation to be a good website for blind users. These features are going to require an accessibility expert to make them accessible.


Accessibility included in agile development[edit]

We know how frustrating it feels for developers caring about accessibility when they learn after their feature is completed that it has accessibility issues and some heavy changes are requested. This situation shall not happen anymore. An accessibility expert could work with developers in an agile development process, and assist developers to produce features that are accessible from the start.

We don't want to waste the time and efforts of developers. When a developer plans to produce a feature in a certain way, an accessibility expert is able to tell what accessibility issue might arise, and provide relevant advice to the developer.

(rewrite) It's a win-win: the developer will not have to investigate accessibility issues after the release trough puzzling bug reports and rewrite his code anymore, while sufficient accessibility is ensured.

Shared goals with the Wikimedia movement[edit]

We believe that the goal to enable "every single human being to freely share in the sum of all human knowledge" includes people with disabilities. (statistics about percentage of disabled, and number of blind in U.S.)

Involvement of the community[edit]

Since the creation of the project in 2007, the community has invested a lot of efforts to improve accessibility. Accessibility guidelines are part of the main guidelines for articles, the Manual of Style (MoS). This shows that the community feels concerned about accessibility.

Conclusion[edit]

We ask the WMF to employ an accessibility expert to work among the development team. He will assist and counsel developers on how to ensure a sufficient level of accessibility (WCAG level AA). He will work with developers since early stages of development, in order to minimize the efforts needed to ensure accessibility of features.

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ The notable non-profit WebAIM conducted screenreader user surveys in 2009, 2010 and 2012. Users ranked Wikipedia as favorite n°3 website, and did not list it in 'Sites to be avoided'.
    A 2011 accessibility audit concluded that although there was room for a lot of improvements, the site is "to an acceptable degree, a useful and operable website".

to add:

quite accessible. WebAIM Screenreader survey listed Wikipedia as favorite #3 of it's respondents group and did not list it in 'Sites to be avoided'."The German version of the free encyclopedia Wikipedia http://de.wikipedia.org is for many users with disabilities, to an acceptable degree, a useful and operable website." - German Language Wikipedia Accessibility Test According to WCAG 2.0 by Third Age Online.</ref>

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