Welcome to dw-accessibility!

[jeshyr]

We have an accessibility community!

So what do users want to put in it? I want to hear your opinions and thoughts and musings and anything else constructive please.

We also have an accessibility mailing list for the accessibility team volunteers, although it's fairly quiet at the moment.

I'm thinking that the community needs lots of "Accessibility 101" documents and links to relevant FAQs such as:

• What do I put in the "Description" field for my user icons?


• How to add links to your post in a friendly manner (aka Why "Click Here" is evil)


• etc.

And also we'll be open to answering user questions.

What else?

Comments

[dreamweaver]

Well we might want to point out which browsers are very accessibility friendly.

Like:

Firefox with it's NoSquint addon, which adds text zooming as well as page zooming.

Opera with built in page zooming.

for those with low vision, which I'm one of those:)

And maybe some instructions on accessibility settings in IE, and Windows.
Like the Windows magnifying tool.

How to find the tools and adjust the settings.

I've had a horrible time with Windows. But Firefox is sweet. Don't care much for Opera. The settings are too hard to find. Firefox makes everything much simpler, right down to changing all web pages to a preferred color with your prferred font sizes and it over rides the web page fonts and colors.

[jadelennox]

Firefox also with its mouseless browsing extension and its accessibility extension, and Opera with its built-in voice (which I'm not sure how many people actually use in production) and its built-in relief fine grained CSS control.

[melannen]

Links to useful applications for accessibility testing?

Detailed descriptions/links to videos of what it's like to use the web for different people?

Lists of accessible layouts? (I'm assuming all the public DW ones will be, but a list of good custom ones and good S2 styles from LJ would also be nice.)

Who to tell if you run into an accessibility issue on DW?

(Just brainstorming here with things I've wondered about.)

[nostariel]

Lists of accessible layouts? (I'm assuming all the public DW ones will be, but a list of good custom ones and good S2 styles from LJ would also be nice.)

I've been wanting a list like that for ages.

[jadelennox]

a list of frequently asked questions in the sidebar, which point to documents (in the community directly as posts, or in the wiki?):
1. Introduction to what accessibility means. Usability in general, accessibility for people with visual impairments, hearing loss, physical impairments, cognitive or processing impairments. Accessibility aided by adaptive hardware, accessibility aided by adaptive software, and accessibility for users who have neither. Accessibility as something which is necessary to many, many people.
2. Link to the diversity policy
3. Link to documentation about how to design accessible styles using S2
4. Link to documentation about how to write accessible code as a dreamwidth developer
5. Documentation for people who are writing styles or code and want to test accessibility (e.g. links to the various tools which allow you to emulate screen readers, or Opera's high contrast styles, or Firefox's accessibility extensions which allow you to view pages as as some disabled users might)
6. Link to the document which is going to get written for the documentation people about how to write accessible documentation
7. Link to a document for dreamwidth and users who have accessibility needs and don't know what features the site makes available for them.

An easy way to report accessibility bugs or feature requests:
1. link to all non-closed bugs in them bugzilla which have the keyword "why-accessibility"
2. A document explaining how to use bugzilla to report bugs
3. An explanation that questions about accessibility can be asked in this community and people will try to answer

Should discussions about work in progress happen here or on the mailing list? What about specifications in progress (e.g. WAI-ARIA)? Is this community the right place to hash those issues out? If so, should they be in locked posts so people can distinguish between monitoring for simple accessibility issues and monitoring because they want to follow the actual work in progress?

[nostariel]

a list of frequently asked questions in the sidebar, which point to documents (in the community directly as posts, or in the wiki?)

Posts here would be better, I think. I like the wiki and all, but I know a lot of people find wikis intimidating and confusing, and I think the comment system here makes questions easier to track and manage. Maybe we could copy the posts over to the wiki for the sake of completeness and general reference purposes?

[gaspodia.livejournal.com]

Most of my personal access issues are visual ones, so I'm rather selfishly going to suggest us having FAQ entries on:

How do I increase text size
How do I disable moving icons
How do I switch a page to accesible colours

Even if the above won't be possible in DW, I'd still like to see an FAQ on them as it will save fruitless searching and often save someone getting a headache too.