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Thread: Improving Bootstrap’s woeful accessibility Daniel Nixon

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From: Jennifer Sutton
Date: Thu, Oct 16 2014 2:39PM
Subject: Improving Bootstrap’s woeful accessibility Daniel Nixon
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Greetings:

Since we've had occasion to discuss Bootstrap on this list, from time
to time, I thought I'd share this post, from May 2014, with the list.
Hope some may find it helpful, and perhaps some things have improved
in the last few months.

Here's a public shout-out/thank-you to PayPal for its plugin,
referenced in the piece. Hopefully, it'll get built into core some day.

Best,
Jennifer

Improving Bootstrap's woeful accessibility Daniel Nixon
https://danielnixon.org/improving-bootstraps-woeful-accessibility/

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Fri, Oct 17 2014 2:04AM
Subject: Re: Improving Bootstrap’s woeful accessibility Daniel Nixon
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On 16/10/2014 21:39, Jennifer Sutton wrote:
> Greetings:
>
> Since we've had occasion to discuss Bootstrap on this list, from time to
> time, I thought I'd share this post, from May 2014, with the list.
> Hope some may find it helpful, and perhaps some things have improved in
> the last few months.

Note that the majority of that article is obsolete. Bootstrap's
checkboxes and radio buttons work fine out-of-the-box (so none of the
contortions mentioned there - adding tabindex and role to the label etc
- are necessary). The only aspect that's missing is some form of visual
indication of focus (not to say that's not serious, but it's far from
the problems described in the article).

The one aspect that *is* still relevant is the mention of toggle buttons
and their lack of aria-pressed. I'll dive into that problem (and the
focus one) once I have a moment.

> Here's a public shout-out/thank-you to PayPal for its plugin, referenced
> in the piece. Hopefully, it'll get built into core some day.

My usual bugbear, but: reminder that it doesn't just "get built into
core"...for any changes like that to happen, we need actual people to
make relevant code changes and pull requests. i.e. no point in waiting
for Bootstrap core team to make the necessary changes, but instead we
need more people on the ground to actively work on integrating those
into core.

https://github.com/paypal/bootstrap-accessibility-plugin/issues/1
https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Apatrickhlauke

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

www.splintered.co.uk | https://github.com/patrickhlauke
http://flickr.com/photos/redux/ | http://redux.deviantart.com
twitter: @patrick_h_lauke | skype: patrick_h_lauke

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Fri, Oct 17 2014 8:34AM
Subject: Re: Improving Bootstrap’s woeful accessibility Daniel Nixon
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On 17/10/2014 09:04, Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
> The one aspect that *is* still relevant is the mention of toggle buttons
> and their lack of aria-pressed. I'll dive into that problem (and the
> focus one) once I have a moment.

https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/pull/14819

--
Patrick H. Lauke

www.splintered.co.uk | https://github.com/patrickhlauke
http://flickr.com/photos/redux/ | http://redux.deviantart.com
twitter: @patrick_h_lauke | skype: patrick_h_lauke

From: Jennifer Sutton
Date: Fri, Oct 17 2014 11:38AM
Subject: Re: Improving Bootstrap’s woeful accessibi lity Daniel Nixon
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Patrick et al:

I've a few responses, inline, below.
At 01:04 AM 10/17/2014, you wrote:
>On 16/10/2014 21:39, Jennifer Sutton wrote:
>>Greetings:
>>
>>Since we've had occasion to discuss Bootstrap on this list, from time to
>>time, I thought I'd share this post, from May 2014, with the list.
>>Hope some may find it helpful, and perhaps some things have improved in
>>the last few months.
>
>Patrick wrote:



>Note that the majority of that article is obsolete. Bootstrap's
>checkboxes and radio buttons work fine out-of-the-box (so none of
>the contortions mentioned there - adding tabindex and role to the
>label etc - are necessary).


JS: Thank you for setting the record straight. Spreading
misinformation is never my aim. I made the mistake of assuming that
since it was just tweeted in the last day or two, the article still
had some relevance. We all know how dangerous assumptions are.



> Patrick continues: The only aspect that's missing is some form of
> visual indication of focus (not to say that's not serious, but it's
> far from the problems described in the article).
>
>The one aspect that *is* still relevant is the mention of toggle
>buttons and their lack of aria-pressed. I'll dive into that problem
>(and the focus one) once I have a moment.
>
>>I had written: Here's a public shout-out/thank-you to PayPal for
>>its plugin, referenced
>>in the piece. Hopefully, it'll get built into core some day.
>
>Patrick responded: My usual bugbear, but: reminder that it doesn't
>just "get built into core"...for any changes like that to happen, we
>need actual people to make relevant code changes and pull requests.
>i.e. no point in waiting for Bootstrap core team to make the
>necessary changes, but instead we need more people on the ground to
>actively work on integrating those into core.
>
>https://github.com/paypal/bootstrap-accessibility-plugin/issues/1
>https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Apatrickhlauke

JS: Absolutely! I couldn't agree more with you, Patrick. And to that
end, though I intend to continue to post what I hope will be relevant
information about Bootstrap to this list, I'll refrain from future commentary.

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.

Next up in accessible Bootstrap-land, a string of very recent tweets
which I hope will prove more valuable than the article was.


>P
>--
>Patrick H. Lauke
>
>www.splintered.co.uk | https://github.com/patrickhlauke
>http://flickr.com/photos/redux/ | http://redux.deviantart.com
>twitter: @patrick_h_lauke | skype: patrick_h_lauke

From: deborah.kaplan@suberic.net
Date: Fri, Oct 17 2014 1:28PM
Subject: Re: Improving Bootstrap’s woeful accessibi lity Daniel Nixon
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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.

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Fri, Oct 17 2014 1:43PM
Subject: Re: Improving Bootstrap’s woeful accessibi lity Daniel Nixon
← Previous message | Next message →

On 17/10/2014 20:28, = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = wrote:
> 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.

Of course even just filing bugs or raising issues are important (but
ideally this should be done in the right place - in the case of
Bootstrap, the actual issue tracker on GitHub). However, once filed, a
bug report will linger until somebody else finds the time to read it,
understand it, replicate the problem, and fix it. And it's often
unlikely on big, busy projects that core maintainers will have the
time/head-space to do this...hence, I would suggest a good way forward
for these types of problems would be to file an issue/bug, and then try
to get people with enough actual programming knowledge to take a look at
it and ideally create a fix that's then merge-able by the core
maintainers (which, I won't lie, takes some effort - even for trivial
additions/fixes, it needs to follow contribution rules, code
conventions, have unit tests and so on).

In short: find something that's not quite right in an open-source
product, but don't have the expertise to fix it yourself? File a
bug/issue, then point to it in places where people with that expertise
(and an interest in accessibility) are, like here :)

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

www.splintered.co.uk | https://github.com/patrickhlauke
http://flickr.com/photos/redux/ | http://redux.deviantart.com
twitter: @patrick_h_lauke | skype: patrick_h_lauke

From: Thomas McKeithan II
Date: Sat, Oct 18 2014 5:45AM
Subject: Re: Improving Bootstrap’s woeful accessibi lity Daniel Nixon
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I agree with you Deborah.

Have an awesome day.

Respectfully,
Thomas Lee McKeithan II
QSSI
http://www.qssinc.com
508 SME, SSQA Solutions Center
10480 Little Patuxent Pkwy , Suite 350
Columbia , MD 21044
(301 )977-7884 x1058 (Work)
(202) 276-6437 (Cell)
 

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-----Original Message-----
From: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = [mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ] On Behalf Of = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
Sent: Friday, October 17, 2014 3:28 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Improving Bootstrap’s woeful accessibi lity Daniel Nixon

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.