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Re: Mailman accessibility

for

From: WebAIM
Date: Aug 9, 2005 11:09AM

> Any words of
> wisdom or advice from the WebAim list administrators or anyone else
> regarding Mailman accessibility?

We spent a fair amount of time customizing the user administration pages
to implement accessibility and usability. Most of the changes (as you
note) are beyond the simple HTML templates that are provided. I had to do
a lot of work in the Python code to get form labels, change styles, etc.
While finding the correct files can be daunting, the actual modifications
themselves were not too difficult.

You'll notice that our user page -
http://list.webaim.org/mailman/listinfo/webaim-forum - is much simpler
than the default and has form labels and our own styles applied. As there
are a lot of pages and options, it's likely that I missed some. We also
built forms on our own pages - http://webaim.org/discussion/ - that allow
you to do much of the administration without interfacing too much with the
Mailman templates.

We also use a custom built archiving tool, rather than the archive
provided within Mailman.

With that said, getting the Mailman developers to implement accessibility
will surely be the best remedy. I've posted several recommendations to
their developers list. If enough people ask for it, I believe they will
make the relatively minor changes needed to improve accessibility.

Jared Smith
WebAIM.org