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Thread: wiki accessibility
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From: zara
Date: Sat, Apr 08 2006 6:50PM
Subject: wiki accessibility
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Hi,
I am looking for resources concerning accessibility of wikis for persons with disabilities and my searches have not yielded anything useful.
First, what are the major issues for accessibility of wikis ? Aside from wikis often being a free-for-all so that it is hard to control the content and how the content is structured as well as the use of "pseudo-code" which may not validate or be recognized by assistive tech, are there other issues to be aware of that are specific to wikis ?
Second, what wikis are considered the most accessible ? I have heard good things about tikiwiki (http://tikiwiki.org/) but am unfamiliar with it and can not find specific information on their site concerning accessibility features.
Any information would be greatly appreciated.
Best regards,
Catherine
--
Catherine Roy, consultante
www.catherine-roy.net
514.525.9490
From: Tim Beadle
Date: Mon, Apr 10 2006 3:30AM
Subject: Re: wiki accessibility
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On 09/04/06, zara < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> as well as the use of "pseudo-code" which may not validate or be recognized by
> assistive tech
Just a quick point of fact: that "pseudo-code" is translated into
valid (one hopes!) (X)HTML by the Wiki engine. The code is only used
for editing, not display (else each browser would need a Wiki-markup
parser to make sense of it).
In my naive way, I would imagine that a wiki application would be as
accessible as any other web-based application that uses forms to edit
text.
Regards,
Tim
From: Tim Harshbarger
Date: Mon, Apr 10 2006 12:10PM
Subject: RE: wiki accessibility
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>
>I am looking for resources concerning accessibility of wikis
>for persons with disabilities and my searches have not yielded
>anything useful.
>
>First, what are the major issues for accessibility of wikis ?
>Aside from wikis often being a free-for-all so that it is hard
>to control the content and how the content is structured as
>well as the use of "pseudo-code" which may not validate or be
>recognized by assistive tech, are there other issues to be
>aware of that are specific to wikis ?
Catherine,
Depending on how similar Portal CMS's (Content Management Systems) are
to Wiki's, I might be able to offer some slightly useful information. I
just finished looking at a series of open source Portal CMS's to use on
my own personal web site.
The most pertinent guidelines are W3C's WCAG and ATAG guidelines.
People usually remember the Web Content Accessibility guidelines, but
tend to forget the Authoring Tool Accessibility guidelines. Between the
2 sets of guidelines, I think the 3 major accessibility issues are
addressed.
1. Is the content accessible to the users?
2. Is the tool interface accessible to the authors?
3. Does the tool assist the author in creating accessible content for
the users?
A good paper that summarizes these issues can be found at:
http://www.w3.org/People/Matt/Papers/XML2003.html
I have not done a formal accessibility evaluation on any Wiki's.
However, I do use Wikipedia quite often. I find it to be accessible to
me as someone using a screen reader. I am not so familiar with article
creation, but I have come across a number of article's whose
accessibility surprised me--basically, because information was formatted
in a manner that was accessible to me. Also images tend to have
descriptions, which I always appreciate as long as the image is
important to understanding the content.
I don't have as much experience with some of the other Wiki's, so I
cannot currently say much about their accessibility.
Tim