WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Improving Bootstrap’s woeful accessibi lity Daniel Nixon

for

From: deborah.kaplan@suberic.net
Date: Oct 17, 2014 1:28PM

I'd like to add to this a general practice from the open source
community where I help run the Accessibility Team: all of those
different skills people bring to the table are hugely important.

For example, if you have a bug report, then verifying it is still
a bug in the most recent version of the code, and writing up a
good, specific bug report can be very helpful -- and if it's too much
overhead to figure out how to add that to a bug tracker, then
write to somebody directly. Creating documentation is hugely
valuable. Heck, you know what every single open source community
doesn't have enough of? Testers with disabilities, so that we
can put out calls saying "this works for me with NVDA but I hear
mixed reports with JAWS 11-- I need a tester with that software."
(Because remember, most open source projects cannot buy licenses
of expensive software for testing.)

Reporting bugs, writing documentation, helping prioritize
accessibility bugs, QA, explaining accessibility use cases:
these are also all very valuable skills and tasks. Not all open
source community value these out of the gate -- some open source
communities have an unfortunate tendency to value contributions
by "number of lines of code submitted" -- but all open source
projects SHOULD value these things, and probably most can be
shown how important they are.

-Deborah Kaplan

On Fri, 17 Oct 2014, Jennifer Sutton wrote:
> I will conclude, though, by adding that while I'm in 100%+ agreement with the
> "passion requires pull requests" campaign, not everyone here has the time to
> contribute to open source communities/projects, is subsidized (and perhaps
> even encouraged) by their employer(s) to do so, has the accessibility
> knowledge to know how to make informed and accurate changes, and/or has the
> programming skills that making pull requests requires.
>
> We each have different skills to bring to the table, and I hope mine are
> mostly about sharing timely and accurate information to enable others to work
> for integrated and substantive change.