[theme-reviewers] Managing the Accessibility-Ready tag

[esmi at quirm dot net]

on 20/01/2014 21:13 Otto said the following:
> - Should a theme having the accessibility-ready tag, but having some
> accessibility problems, be sufficient reason for not-approved, at this
> moment in time?

No. But neither should a theme be approved and made live with an 
accessibility-ready tag if it has not undergone an a11y review.

> In short, do we actually have enough reviewers capable of performing
> an accessibility review to make this a mandatory requirement?

Absolutely not at this stage. Nor do I think theme development in 
general is at a stage where an a11y requirement should be mandatory even 
if we had the necessary reviewers. The last thing we want to do is 
constrain developers who want to submit themes. What we would *like* to 
do is encourage developers to start thinking about accessible themes. We 
should also be offering those who do already create such themes the 
option to highlight this positive feature. Ditto for those searching for 
accessibility-ready themes

> Do we  have a document to teach people how to perform such a review?

No and such a document would take quite a while to create as, unlike 
many parts of the standard Theme Review, the logic isn't always binary.

> Do we have written standards?

Yes. <http://make.wordpress.org/themes/guidelines/guidelines-accessibility/>

> Better yet, can those standards be turned into
> objective tests that we can add to Theme-Check?

The guidelines mentioned above are about as objective as a11y gets but I 
don't think there's *any* way to turn them into tests for the Theme 
Check. I don't think there's any script that could check for colour 
contrasts and look for repetitive non-contextual text strings (to name 
just 2 points). That's why a11y parsers are so crude and sometimes 
mis-leading compared to (say) the W3C HTML validator. It's really a job 
that needs human judgement due to all that dang non-binary stuff.

> The field of accessibility seems a bit subjective to me. I have read
> the documents and all the stuff at the make blog on the topic, and I
> still feel that I would not be qualified to determine what is
> "accessible" or not.

You are not alone. :-) A colleague of mine with a PhD in parallel 
programming once described a11y auditing as akin to "plaiting fog".

> We need some form of standards and people willing to review to those
> standards in order to make this sort of thing a "required" step.
> Otherwise we end up with people stuck in the queue forever because
> nobody's around to do the review for them.

Not necessarily. If a theme is "stuck" because it uses the 
accessibility-ready tag and there's no one around to review it within 
(say) 7 days, the theme author could be given the option of removing the 
tag so that the theme could be pushed live. The theme could then be 
re-submitted at a later date with the accessibility-ready tag added back 
in again for an a11y review.

Thoughts?

Mel
-- 
http://quirm.net
http://blackwidows.co.uk