Talk:Wikimedia Accessibility User Group

A request to candidates in the 2021 Board of Trustees election

Hello @ProtoplasmaKid, Waltercolor, Discott, GerardM, Fjmustak, Ravidreams, Pavan santhosh.s, AshLin, Raavimohantydelhi, Laurentius, Mike Peel, Rosiestep, Reda Kerbouche, Lionel Scheepmans, Adamw, Vini 175, Yasield, Victoria, and Pundit:. Thanks for being candidate at this 2021 Board of Trustees election.

Some of you are already aware of the Wikimedia Accessibility User Group, as you already joined our Telegram group. In any case, you might have a look at our Meta page to learn more on our group and its aim.

I wanted to know what each of you think about accessibility, at which level it is currently taken into account in our Wikimedia platforms, and what specific actions or guidelines you are attending to promote and defend regarding accessibility if you are elected on the board.

I understand that you might be already greatly solicited with other requests, so even a very brief answer would be very appreciated. If you do reply, please create a subsection with your own name or nickname bellow to hold it. Thank you very much for your attention, and possibly your answer. 🙏 --Psychoslave (talk) 19:29, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

I think that accessibity is super important, as it is one of the barriers to participation that we can eliminate with technology. I do not feel competent to know which technology we can use. I know, however from our discussions on Telegram, that we're far from optimal. Even the elections page is poorly readable on phone, or parsed. I think it is the role of the WMF community's team to learn and gather feedback from groups such as Accessibility Group, to learn what would work best. If elected to the board, I will endorse such approach and discuss specific accessibility problems worth the team. Pundit (talk) 19:43, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Hi Mathieu, personally, I have promoted the vision in my interventions in the movement of "leaving no one behind", therefore, I consider accessibility as a fundamental element for inclusion, as important as others such as language. I do not know, for example, how would be an evaluation today of our projects both in reading and editing considering an international document such as the guiding principles of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and evaluate the necessary adjustments that would have to be made eventually as a movement. If I am elected to the Board I will try to raise the attention on this concerns. Thanks for the question. --ProtoplasmaKid (talk) 20:19, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for the invitation. As a developer at both WMF and WMDE, I've seen that our approach to accessibility can be inconsistent. We need to consider this at the beginning of feature design, but sometimes we leave it until the end of a project. We don't have many experts with accessibility experience and many of us have trouble interpreting industry standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The solution might be to highlight accessibility as an explicit priority for the movement, use that to form a special-interest group among the staff, and give them funding to do things like set up training for the software department, give them a voice to reform our process by including accessibility in high-level project reporting, and hire experts and more diverse staff who have personal experience in accessible environments. To mention a related topic, my team at WMDE has put a lot of effort into supporting Javascript-free editing, my recollection is that as many as 10% of our (human) visitors might not have sufficient Javascript to support our advanced features, this is a major issue that should be considered everywhere but again has had uneven success so far. —Adamw (talk) 20:34, 19 August 2021 (UTC)