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Making Bootstrap more accessible...

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From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Aug 1, 2013 5:04PM

Hey all,

I've seen that recently there's been some discussion here about some
shortcomings in Bootstrap, a general feeling that the Bootstrap folks
aren't particularly interested in accessibility, and what the community
could do to fix this...

From my own experience, the Bootstrap maintainers are no different from
the majority of developers out there: they often lack the interest, time
and knowledge to commit to accessibility. But, particularly as Bootstrap
is open source and on github, one thing that they ARE receptive to are
good pull requests to the project.

At the risk of sounding patronising or obvious, it's not enough to
simply point out the flaws, or to go off and construct separate
versions/demos of how Bootstrap should be changed [1] - because this
will require the core maintainers to go off and first understand the
issues, unpack whatever the fixes from the demos are, and work out how
to integrate these changes into their code base. In an ideal world of
course they would...but that requires time and effort on their part.

It's a cliche' of open source to counter any complaint about problems
with "where's the patch?", but in my own experience [2] I found that the
one thing that developers are happy to act on are well-constructed pull
requests to the original code, which follow their conventions, don't
introduce any regressions, and can simply be auto-merged in github
without them needing to do any additional work.

Certainly, not everybody's technical enough to provide a fully-formed
patch...but for those who CAN, this seems to be the route that makes it
far more likely to get fixes/changes done upstream (and yes, once you
have a good pull request, it of course won't hurt to lobby for it a bit
on twitter etc to core maintainers like Mark https://twitter.com/mdo)

Anyway, I'll take off my captain obvious cape now. Just wanted to throw
this one out there, as I've been discussing this with a few folks
recently...

P

[1] https://github.com/mpnkhan/BootStrapExamples/issues/1
[2] https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/pull/6441

--
Patrick H. Lauke