Tag Archives: theme

Joe Dolson 3:15 pm on March 19, 2013
Tags: audit, theme   

Theme accessibility audit guidelines update

Hey, all. I’ve updated the theme auditing guidelines and they have now been added to the theme reviewer’s documentation. Take a look at the requirements for the #accessibility-ready theme tag and comment back here with any suggestions or changes.

Note that these guidelines are in addition to the rest of the theme guidelines, and there are many quality guidelines already established that don’t need to be part of the accessibilityAccessibility 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) audit.

#audit, #theme

esmi 12:14 pm on March 8, 2013
Tags: , theme   

Accessibility for Theme Developers: First Draft Complete

I think I’ve finally finished! *gasp* Thank you to everyone who provided earlier feedback and jogged my memory.

Is there anything on the completed page I need to re-word or explain in more detail?

As previously, please post all feedback here rather than on the draft page itself.

#documention, #theme

esmi 12:00 pm on March 5, 2013
Tags: , theme   

Accessibility for Theme Developers

As part of the larger WordPress documentation project, I’ve put together a very rough first draft of an accessibility section for the theme developers’ handbook. It still needs a lot of fleshing out as I’m approaching this from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know anything about web accessibilityAccessibility 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). So I feel that we need to not only tell theme developers what to do but how and why.

That said, is the draft missing anything major — bearing in mind that we do not want to overwhelm theme developers?

#feedback, #theme

Cyndy Otty 2:25 pm on February 21, 2013
Tags: , , , , theme,   

IRC Meeting Summary: 20 Feb. 2013

As evidenced by our small group at yesterday’s meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area., I want to first remind you all that we could very much use new members! Whether you are a developer and very technical or merely a writer with special needs, we would certainly welcome you to join us. Anyway, despite our numbers and lack of a formal agenda, our main discussion was on two topics that will be our primary focus presently.

Custom Menus

As the trac ticket concerning design changes to the Custom Menu has been closed, we discussed centering accessibilityAccessibility 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) discussion around the reopened trac ticket #14045. The proposal is for an accessibility mode screen alternative like that which the Widgets page utilizes. We also have a post devoted to this topic here as well for your consideration and comments.

Twenty Thirteen

Feedback is strongly requested from an accessibility standpoint on the new default theme Twenty Thirteen, which is currently being developed. You can check out the theme here at the Twenty Thirteen demo site and please report any feedback you have.

The full log of yesterday’s IRC meeting can be found here at #wordpress-ui logs for February 20, 2013.

#core-2, #irc, #meetup, #menus, #theme, #twentythirteen

esmi 5:03 pm on February 20, 2013
Tags: , , theme,   

Twenty Thirteen

Development on the next default theme — Twenty Thirteen — has now reached a point where our feedback is needed. You can see and use the theme (currently still in alpha) at its own Twenty Thirteen demo site.

Please post all feedback here. If you are using assistive technologyAssistive technology Assistive technology is an umbrella term that includes assistive, adaptive, and rehabilitative devices for people with disabilities and also includes the process used in selecting, locating, and using them. Assistive technology promotes greater independence by enabling people to perform tasks that they were formerly unable to accomplish, or had great difficulty accomplishing, by providing enhancements to, or changing methods of interacting with, the technology needed to accomplish such tasks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assistive_technology to browse the demo site, please indicate exactly what software you are using — including the version number, if possible.

Come on, people. If you want a truly beautiful example of an accessible WordPress default theme, now is the time to point out any issues and support the theme’s developers.

#a11y-audit, #core-2, #theme, #twentythirteen

Joe Dolson 11:12 pm on February 13, 2013
Tags: reviews, theme   

Progress Report: Theme Review Guidelines for Accessibility

Per the most recent conversations about the accessibilityAccessibility 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)-ready tag for the theme repository, I’ve been working on establishing some new classes for the Theme Check plug-in that can scan themes for accessibility issues.

Because accessibility is not easily verified, particularly when you’re not working in an HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. context, most of these are relatively generalized, and work on the principle that I want to avoid false positives (accessibility issues detected that don’t actually exist), but am perfectly comfortable with false negatives. The reason for this is that these are only intended to be indicative flags; they aren’t intended to substitute for an actual reviewer going over the themes and judging it according to the theme accessibility audit guidelines.

The idea is that any definite failures we can identify before engaging in a hands-on review are beneficial — and because theme authors have access to the Theme Check plug-in and can scan for these issues themselves, and learn of them before they submit.

I’ve prepared six classes to extend the Theme Check plug-in, but they could all stand a review (and some creativity in reviewing other areas, if you’re comfortable enough with PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php.).

You can download my modified version of the Theme Check plug-in (six new files, one edited: new files in /checks/, prefixed with a11y; edited file is just the stylesheet, to add a color for the class .tc-accessibility.)

Experiment with it, change it, let me know.

Some of these are very superficial or crude checks; but if you have an idea how to improve them, share your wisdom! Keep in mind that all of these tests are performed on un-rendered code; so using a DOM parsing engine is not an option — we can use standard testing methods when it comes to reviewing the ultimate output of the theme.

Accesskeys

Any use of accesskey is a failure, so this class returns an error if any occurrence of the string ‘accesskey’ occurs anywhere in any theme PHP file.

Form labeling

Examines each PHP file individually. If any file contains input, textarea or select elements without also containing a label element, returns an error. This is superficial, as it doesn’t currently verify that there is any equivalency between inputs and labels, and doesn’t specifically exclude hidden inputs as an acceptable case.

Image alt

Examines each PHP file individually. If any file contains the string ‘<img’ but does not contain the string ‘alt=’ it returns an error. It’s crude, and this could definitely be improved.

Empty links

Examines each PHP file individually. Runs a regex to identify link text, returns errors for any link with no content. However, the actually cases within a theme are so diverse that there are *many* circumstances that this won’t pick up using the current rules, including link texts consisting only of white space characters, linked images with no alt attributes, or complex PHP concatenations.

Tabindex

Just like the accesskey check. However, there are allowable cases for use of tabindex, and this class does not account for those at the moment.

Headings

Scans the PHP files for occurrences of the strings ‘<h1’ and ‘<h2’. All it’s verifying is the presence of structural headings. If no structural headings are found anywhere in the code, it returns an error indicating a lack of HTML heading structure. Also very crude, but it will pick up the worst-case scenario.

#reviews, #theme

esmi 3:12 pm on January 15, 2013
Tags: theme,   

Aaron Jorbin is suggesting that the new Twenty…

Aaron Jorbin is suggesting that the new Twenty Thirteen should be designed and built “accessibilityAccessibility 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) first”. He outlines exactly what he means by this in What I want to see in the Twenty Thirteen theme. I think this is an initiative we should all support 100%.

#theme, #twentythirteen