Authoring Tool Accessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) Guidelines Testing
Jeanne Spellman (http://www.w3.org/People/jeanne/), W3C, joined us for the meeting to discuss the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) testing we will be doing on trunk starting May 12. ATAG testing is, in part, useful for guiding development of accessible “software for generating websites, for example, content management systems (CMS).”
ATAG Overview
The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) Overview explains how ATAG testing will:
- help make authoring tools themselves accessible, so that people with disabilities can create web content, and
- help authors create more accessible web content — specifically: enable, support, and promote the production of content that conforms to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG WCAG is an acronym for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines are helping make sure the internet is accessible to all people no matter how they would need to access the internet (screen-reader, keyboard only, etc) https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/.).
ATAG Testing Harness
The W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.https://www.w3.org/. is developing an automated way to deliver ATAG test instructions and test result tracking and reports. It will also display WCAG test instructions and techniques, where applicable. In the the overall test instructions doc that was used when developing the tests there are general instructions at the top, followed by a table with the ATAG success criteria, and the test(s) for each one. As we are testing to WCAG level AA so will we be testing to ATAG level AA.
Process
Jeanne has about 15 volunteer testers. Thank you Jeanne! She explained the process: “We set up a page of accessible content, and a page of inaccessible content. Then we have a page of different types of content – video, audio, tables. Some of the ATAG tests check to see if WordPress breaks accessible content, while others see if WordPress fixes inaccessible content.” We discussed access to a test instance of WordPress trunk which is ready to go thanks to Rian Rietveld. There is no estimate as to how long the testing will take since it is a new process.
Helping WordPress and the W3C
This process will help improve WordPress and it will also help make ATAG 2.0 a finalized W3C standard. We are testing to WCAG level AA so we will be testing to ATAG level AA which will help the W3C process. Jeanne explained: “The writing is all done, and now we just need to prove to W3C management that there are 2 real world examples of every success criteria and 5 authoring tools have implemented ATAG level A. AA is a huge bonus.”
Accounts and Trac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/.
We noted that the volunteer testers will all need WordPress accounts. Aaron Jorbin very thoughtfully posted the core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. handbook link to working with trac and opening a ticket. Joe Dolson noted that: “It (testing) doesn’t have to be finished to be able to create tickets – we should be ticketing every discovery as we move forward.” The W3C team will be able to pull reports of all the errors from the testing harness tool which should facilitate the process.
