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Re: Making Bootstrap more accessible...

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Aug 6, 2013 8:34AM

On 06/08/2013 12:50, Maraikayar Prem Nawaz wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Thanks Patrick for bringing in the issue of Bootstrap Accessibility.
>
> BootStrap is used by more than 1% of the Web
> http://blog.meanpath.com/twitter-bootstrap-now-powering-1-percent-of-the-web/
> Which means more and more websites share these Inaccessible components (
> http://expo.getbootstrap.com/) . Their main focus is on
> Mobile,performance,etc., and NOT on Accessibility.

Which is understandable, and reflected in the vast majority of projects
out there.

> I agree with Patrick comment:
> "BootStrap Developers lack the interest, time and knowledge to commit to
> accessibility"
> As you could clearly see from the accessibility issues filed, that many of
> them are closed even without any actual work on the fix.
> https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/search?q=accessibility&type=Issues

I only had a cursory glance over the list of issues there, but I see
that a lot of them are actually openend by the maintainers themselves.
So the situation is not too dire. Also, some of the ones closed are
clearly being closed because they state problems, rather than also
providing a mergeable code patch with the solution, which reinforces my
point, and general administrivia (something filed against an old or
wrong branch).

> Probably what they need probably is a push for Accessibility. We could
> create new github tickets( https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/new) and
> try to push. I will also try to work for this in my free time.

I would definitely suggest working on a few, but well-formed pull
requests with mergeable code, rather than filing a large number of
purely "problem description" type issues. Don't see it as a "they need a
push" - this seems to imply that, after enough pushing, we'll finally
get the devs to prioritize accessibility, which isn't going to
happen...if anything, they'll get weary of yet another a11y request.
Instead, the onus is on us (tech-savvy and accessibility-savvy people)
to keep an eye on the project, and where necessary push code back into
the main repo.

> And as Jennifer rightly said it takes lot of time to work on the fix,
> though the fix may be small.
> Patrick, you know what i mean. You had to get back to the issue couple of
> times, before it got merged to wip. (
> https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/pull/6441) .

Yup, it's not easy, definitely. But I see it as meeting the
developers/core maintainers half-way with ready code. The rest of the
discussion in my specific case was more about clarifying some of the
more subjective points (as we know, there are many different takes on
certain aspects of accessibility, which even "experts" can't agree on),
in particular ARIA's key handling for menus which I'm not a fan of...

> But I could see that the developers are trying hard to fix some of the
> issues (https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/pull/9137).

Anyway, sorry, don't mean to disagree. I think we're working towards the
same goal. My main point, again, is that the key to getting Bootstrap
(and similar projects) more accessible is to actually engage with the
devs in their own language, on their own terms...which means pull
requests with ready code :)


Cheers,

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke