[theme-reviewers] Accessibility Auditing of themes progress

[Joe Dolson]

I'm not specifically familiar with any themes that implement all of
these requirements -- Mel may be aware of some. Her themes are fairly
likely to be accessible, but I haven't looked at them specifically.

I know that Sylvia Egger did a child theme of Twenty Ten that
implements numerous accessibility features into that theme; and Paul
Adam has built a plug-in that does a similar thing for Twenty Eleven,
but neither of those are independent themes.

I've written a plug-in
(http://wordpress.org/plugins/extend/wp-accessibility/) that can add
skip links into themes and can also fix the repetitive text issue, at
least when it comes to the 'Read more' links that are the usual
offenders in WordPress sites, but that plug-in doesn't implement
keyboard navigability.

Keyboard navigability is, however, usually easy to implement: all it
requires is making certain that the stylesheet applies a visible style
on the :focus state for input fields and links -- a little trickier
when it comes to drop down menus, but still not difficult. That :focus
state doesn't even need to be different from the :hover state, as long
as the :hover state is easily differentiated from the passive state.

Best,
Joe



On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 6:54 PM, Kirk Wight <kwight at kwight.ca> wrote:
> Great job Joe, very detailed and specific.
>
> Can you post an example/download of a theme that would meet all of these
> requirements, if you know of one? I have a hard time imagining how various
> sections would be implemented (Link Text, Keyboard Navigation and Skip Links
> are my first questions marks). Seeing actual code would really help
> imagining the work that would be involved in reviewing a theme of this
> nature.
>
> Thanks for all of your work!
>
>
> On 23 October 2012 17:12, Joe Dolson <design at joedolson.com> wrote:
>>
>> So, my last message on this fell silently to the earth...so, here goes
>> again.
>>
>> Mel and I have worked on a basic theme audit document with the
>> requirements for being approved
>> for an accessibility related tag. That document can be seen here, in draft
>> form.
>>
>>
>> http://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/theme-accessibility-audit-draft-proposal/
>>
>> Obviously, some questions require resolution from this group to be
>> able to finalize the document.
>>
>> The specific next steps seem to be:
>>
>> 1) Reach consensus that these audit guidelines are acceptable and
>> achievable.
>> 2) Determine the text of the tag -- I'd suggest 'accessibility-ready'
>> is a good one; but I'm open-minded.
>> 3) Update Tag Filter
>>
>> Best,
>> Joe
>>
>> =======
>> Review: Chip's steps to implementation:
>> 1) Clearly defined requirements, ideally listed somewhere in the Codex
>> 2) Updated Tag Filter
>> 3) Identify accessibility guidelines that can be evaluated
>> programmatically via Theme-Check where possible
>> 4) Identify accessibility guidelines that can be incorporated into the
>> Theme Unit Test Data where possible
>> 5) Identify accessibility guidelines that can only be verified by a live
>> person
>> 6) Set up Theme-Trac workflow to shunt Themes using the Accessibility
>> tags into a separate queue
>> 7) Volunteers to review Themes in the Accessibility queue in Theme-Trac
>> _______________________________________________
>> theme-reviewers mailing list
>> theme-reviewers at lists.wordpress.org
>> http://lists.wordpress.org/mailman/listinfo/theme-reviewers
>
>
>
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>



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