[theme-reviewers] Accessible theme issues

[esmi at quirm dot net]

on 28/09/2012 14:44 Edward Caissie said the following:
> Perhaps three tags: Accessibility-A, Accessibility-AA,
> and Accessibility-AAA? Just some food for thought ...

As much as I'd love for that to happen, I would be very wary of 
implementing that.

As I've mentioned previously, I think we have to be very careful not to 
"over sell" accessible themes to non-technical site owners. I wouldn't 
want someone to think that, because a theme is labelled 
Accessibility-AAA, then that's all they have to do in that direction. 
Far from it. Choosing the right theme is only the beginning. Site 
authors then have to commit time and care to their content to maintain 
any level of accessibility [1].

Secondly, under WCAG 2.0, you cannot use A, AA or AAA without also 
having content and providing a shed load of documentation. So I think 
anything that correlates directly to WCAG Levels should be avoided at 
all costs.

Instead, just a generic "accessible" or "accessibility-reviewed" 
advisory tag should be used. All that tag should ever imply is that said 
theme passed an audit (carried out by the MWA group) using the published 
accessibility criteria (to be created, published & maintained by the the 
same group) using the Theme Unit Test Data. No more. Those with the 
requite knowledge can then check the access review criteria to determine 
what, if any, further changes they might want to make to the theme 
itself. Non-technical site owners, in the meantime, can feel reassured 
that they've got off to the right start.

In terms of the actual levels of access, I'm thinking of all of Level A 
checkpoints (which is actually not that hard to achieve) plus some of 
the more important AA points. We need to make this achievable without a 
massive learning curve and ensure that WPORG doesn't inadvertently make 
claims that it cannot back up.

Mel

[1] And we're working on that too. The Codex Accessibility page has been 
completely rewritten and there's an intro type page currently being 
drafted for the new User Manual at <http://make.wordpress.org/support/>
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