Wikimedia Accessibility User Group

Logotype for the user group.

The Wikimedia Accessibility User Group gather people to focus on accessibility within the Wikimedia movement.

The group aims to clarify priorities and coordinate efforts on accessibly at large. This is envisioned as a way to improve the movement achievements wherever careful attention under an accessibility viewpoint can positively impact our common goals by providing a more inclusive Wikimedia environment and widen the usefulness of our shared resources for everyone.

Scope

Our group ambitions to embrace the issue of accessibility through an open interpretation of this word: wherever a difficulty to access our community could rise, be it to consult information, contribute online, join an event carried at some venue, this holds within our scope.

Under such a free perspective, our sphere of activity encompasses inter alia:

• attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
• deafness
• digital divide
• dyslexia
• language barriers
• reduced mobility
• social discrimination
• visual impairment

This doesn't mean of course that the group is there to hold the full load of actions required to achieve excellence in accessibility for each related point. Some specific points might be better handled by more focused entities like WikiBlind user group and language committee or through more transversal efforts like developers taking into account standards of the Web Accessibility Initiative WAI in their projects.

Current highlighted topics

So far we identified 6 main themes on which we aim to focus our efforts:

• improving accessibility of the registration process in our Mediawiki instances
• providing alternative uncluttered text version of articles
• achieving alternative text to images as cohesively structured data on Commons
• supporting efforts to deploy Wikispeech
• nurturing initiatives around sign languages
• tracking and solving user interface concerns for people with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

The rest of this section detail each of them, providing context, state of the art, projections and links to go further.

Text alternative to media

Related resources:

• phab:T166094 "Allow editors to provide default alt text on Wikimedia Commons file description pages"
• Information Structured Acceleration a multilingual, mobile-first tool, that makes it easy for people to add micro-contributions in the form of structured data (descriptions, captions, tags, etc.) to images that have been contributed to Wikimedia Common
• Wikimania 2021 session "Imagine all images described: Alternative text to images as cohesively structured data on Commons"
  • https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/wikimania2021-alternative-text-images

Sign languages

Related resources:

• incubator:Category:Incubator:Test wikis of sign languages
• Wikidata query service: "Instance of" "sign language"
• Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Miscellaneous/Vertical writing support

Roadmap

• structuring our user group, gather people, following processes to
• eliciting our priorities
• widening awareness of accessibility concerns and efforts within the community
• making accessibility a voiced priority in the movement strategy
• determine further clarifications on what actions need to be done, what resources are required, what plans will lead us to the fulfillment of our goal

History

This section intend to sum up initiative around accessibility within the Wikimedia movement.

Contact

• Join the Telegram group

Members

1. Ainali (talk) 06:52, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
2. AshLin (talk) 06:44, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
3. DrMel (talk) 06:50, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
4. Psychoslave (talk) 05:49, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
5. Tochiprecious (talk) 08:33, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
6. Quiddity (talk) 18:13, 2 August 2021 (UTC)
7. SHISHIR DUA (talk) 06:21, 8 August 2021 (UTC)
8. Zend2020--Zend2020 (talk) 17:55, 17 August 2021 (UTC)
9. Ciell (talk) 18:00, 17 August 2021 (UTC)
10. stjn^[ru] 15:34, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
11. Dnshitobu (talk) 16:24, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

See also

• WikiBlind User Group, which gather people more closely our members on the topic of access for blind, low vision and sighted people.

Related resources

• Computer accessibility on Wikipedia
• Web accessibility on Wikipedia
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility
• Wikipedia:Dyslexic readers
• Alt-Texts in Structured Commons
• Pad serving as place to take notes during Jun 2021 on the topic of accessibility
• Accessibility workboard on Phabricator
• Be My Eyes - See the world together: potentiel partner for some projects, they edit a free app that connects blind and low-vision people with sighted volunteers and company representatives for visual assistance through a live video call.
• Gallaudet University - What you do here changes the world!, the only university in the world where students live and learn using American Sign Language (ASL) and English.
• Perkins School For The Blind