Hello there, fellow developers.
I’m Hajime. About two weeks ago, I’ve joined the Indico project on the UN side to implement accessibility improvements. Right now we are waiting for the accessibility assessment, and while we are waiting for those, we are going to start with some light-weight assessments of our own and fix any issues we can find on our own.
Some of the things we will be changing will have a broad impact on most parts of the Indico UI. It is therefore my wish to get as many developers onboard this journey and share how I approach these changes so that we can establish a common mental framework for building accessible UIs.
A secondary goal of this thread is to solicit feedback before changes are made. Therefore, I will try to write down my intentions early and frequently. Please feel free to jump in at any point and comment on the intended changes. Although I’m a veteran web developer, I’m new to Indico, so your feedback will be very valuable.
Finally, if you are developing some UI and would like some feedback regarding accessibility, feel free to comment here.
Tools used
If you are interested in what tools are used to perform the assessment:
- WAVE extension
- Web developer extension
- Chrome devtools Lighthouse tab (accessibility audits section)
- HeadingsMap extension
About accessibility success criteria
Currently, the standard accessibility success criteria are provided by W3C Web Accessibility Initiative in the form of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2 (a.k.a. WCAG 2). WAI provides a checklist that is normally used to perform accessibility assessment.
The tools mentioned above are only able to cover a subset of the issues covered in the checklist. Humans usually perform additional verifications.
Success criteria (SC) are organized by priority into three levels:
- A - absolute minimum
- AA - must-have for most sites
- AAA - must-have for less common cases
Meeting criteria up to level AA is considered standard in general cases.
(I think you’ll find that responsiveness was never a really a main goal of Indico so we’d definitely appreciate your help on that front)