Review accessibility and document issues necessary to bring into compliance

[jasonlally]

The existing framework cut a lot of corners to get something up for internal stakeholders. Now I want to step back and review the accessibility of the site. This is a great project for someone that really loves testing and documentation and another person (or the same) that can implement the changes.

Also, I want to do some deeper UI work on making the maps and charts super accessible. So going beyond compliant to actually creating patterns for using open source libraries to create accessible web based maps and charts. For this I'd like to bring in some real users to test assumptions.

[lamarjordanux]

Hello Jason: I would love to help you with this. I am an Accessibility Consultant and Web Developer and I recently joined Code for San Francisco to help out in this area. My company has an online tool that helps to assess 508 compliance, and I have 3+ years of experience in this area that you will find very helpful. My email is lamarjordanux@gmail.com and I am available ASAP.

[jasonlally]

@lamarjordanux that sounds great! We can wait till Wednesday if you want me to give you a rundown in person. Most of the site framework is in place so I think we are at a point where layering in accessibility updates makes sense. There will be additional content added over the next month, much of which is processed via templates.

You're welcome to, of course, begin by forking and cloning and poking around on your local copy.

To get started locally, it's easiest to install bundler (and Ruby/RVM if you don't have it):

gem install bundler

And then clone the repo to your computer and run

bundle install

inside the directory.

After installation, you should be able to run:

jekyll serve -w --baseurl ''

inside the repo and then go to http://localhost:4000

[jasonlally]

Oh and if you do get a running start, can you do work on a separate branch: fix-accessibility

[lamarjordanux]

thanks!

[jasonlally]

@lamarjordanux - sorry I meant to give you guidance on what areas are worth doing an accessibility review on. I'll do my best here to describe that:

1. All of the programs/policies pages will be formatted using templates, the best one to run a test on is inclusionary housing which includes all of the elements that the other pages will have when complete. Fixes made on the template will propagate to the other policy pages
2. The home and about page could shift a bit more...happy to have general guidance here, but I wouldn't go too deep as the structure and layout may change, but I'd love to get your professional opinion on how to do that right when new content is layered in
3. The data browser pages are mostly in shape structurally, there may be some fine tuning on styles, but the structure is generally in place. You can take a look at one map and one chart visualization to get a sense of the accessibility challenges (and like policies and programs, we'll make templated changes that propagate to the other visualizations). I already know these are going to fail accessibility tests as the data aren't being provided in screen-reader friendly formats. I'd love to have your expertise for best practices around charts and maps.

Let me know if you have any questions and thank you sooooo much for your help!!! :+1: :+1: :+1:

Also, you may want to git pull the latest updates on gh-pages before you do your investigation.

[lamarjordanux]

Awesome! I set up an account in my company's AMP tool (a tool for tracking bugs and violations) for this project and I'll be sending you an invitation. I'm hoping that since many of the projects I have looked at use bootstrap we can leverage what we learn here for multiple projects.

[lamarjordanux]

Hey Jason: One part of the system that I may not be able to change, but could be a quick win for you is to make sure the charts and the maps have an alternative textual representation in the form of a list or data table or some type of text that is easily viewable by screen reader users. The bar chart can definitely be a list or a data table (which must have headers), but the maps may need a kind of sitemap-ish page, or a data table...we can try to figure it out based on the data. Here is the violation, and you can check out the link to the Best Practice (the Violation link) to learn more about this (I gave you login credentials on google groups).

https://amp.ssbbartgroup.com/public/reporting/view_instance.php?instance_id=887744691