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mozilla / webliteracymap

A collaborative effort, led by Mozilla, to define the skills and competencies required to read, write and participate on the web.
http://webmaker.org/literacy
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Create skills underpinning 'Accessibility' competency #16

Closed dajbelshaw closed 9 years ago

dajbelshaw commented 9 years ago

We decided on the 29th January community call to separate out 'Design & Accessibility' into two discrete competencies.This has been reflected in the repo (#13). Now we need to come up with the skills for Accessibility.

For reference, v1.1:

sometimesmotion commented 9 years ago

I think that empathy, awareness and design/planning are important for this competency:

From design: Improving the accessibility of a web page by modifying its color scheme and markup Designing the structure of a web page to improve its hierarchy/conceptual flow (changed 'reorganzing to designing to highlight proactive planning, not retroactive fixing)

Potential new skills: Empathizing with all users and identifying how specific user interactions are accessed by people possessing varying abilities Developing an awareness of the ways in which people with disabilities access content on the Web *Using strategies and tools to assess and improve accessibility

1 & #5 are fairly similar and could potentially be combined - my intention was to add the assessment/evaluation of a site's accessibility

jgmac1106 commented 9 years ago

I like trying to get at awareness and empathy, and kudos on thinking about this as something you do first rather than fix later.

I had originally thought about moving hierarchy to composing but didn't grasp the relationship to accessibility. Makes sense here.

dajbelshaw commented 9 years ago

Thanks for the input @sometimesmotion & @jgmac1106. Definitely want to make empathy a part of what we're aiming for here with a re-scoped 'Accessibility' competency.

The balance we need to strike is to get at the spirit of accessibility on the web, while making the skill descriptors verb-based. This means we (and others) can create activities whereby the learner has either demonstrated an understanding/grasp of that skill, or not.

Does that make sense? Love the suggestions so far - let's keep thinking!

jamiea commented 9 years ago

Long since preferred using 'Inclusivity' for this competency. Don't know if this W3 'Designing for Inclusion' overview is useful for those who haven't seen it. http://www.w3.org/WAI/users/Overview.html

dajbelshaw commented 9 years ago

Nice suggestion @jamiea - thanks for the link! Just wondering how current that is, given that it was last updated three years ago and the W3C now have stuff at the following URL?

http://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/accessibility

sometimesmotion commented 9 years ago

I think that the idea of 'inclusion' as outlined in the W3C document @jamiea shared is important- that accessibility improves the experience for everyone, not just those of us labeled as 'disabled.' This is akin to universal design (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_design). So perhaps by avoiding the word 'disability' we can (passively) employ this concept.

• Using empathy and awareness to inform the design of web content that is accessible to all users

This isn't as concrete as I'd like but I think a bit better than my previous two bullets about empathy and awareness. Trying to nail down empathy and awareness as skills that can be assessed is tricky, though, and this skill description still doesn't quite make it.

I'd also like to see something about measures to enhance accessibility like @jgmac1106's point about text alternatives, but with a broader net to encapsulate not only markup and design but validators, color contrast analyzers, and other tools we can use to check for accessibility. That was the point of my "Using strategies and tools to assess and improve accessibility" but that seems too vague.

dajbelshaw commented 9 years ago

I think we're definitely heading in the right direction here, @jamiea and @sometimesmotion. We're going to be discussing this on this week's community call: https://teach.etherpad.mozilla.org/weblitmap-5feb15

Hope you can both make it!

dajbelshaw commented 9 years ago

On this week's community call we hacked away at the skills underpinning the Accessibility competency. Below is what we ended up with, but it's only a starter for ten!

jgmac1106 commented 9 years ago

This sounds more like an activity to get to an outcome rather than the outcome itself. I would say

sometimesmotion commented 9 years ago

I like @jgmac1106's edit and want to add an action verb (I think 'exploring' sounds more exciting than 'practicing,' but either is good)-

I think that a major change with this simpler wording is the omission of the reference to senses. This omission follows the concept that @jamiea refers to above as 'inclusion' or universal design (designing to everyone regardless of dis/ability, etc.). I think this is more encompassing and inclusive, but may require some explanation. That is to say- for people unfamiliar with the concepts and issues surrounding accessibility & universal design, the skill descriptions may seem vague and too open-ended to be helpful. Perhaps there needs to be a specific reference to universal design in one of the skill descriptions or within the competency descriptor?

Do we agree that inclusive/universal design is the focus we are aiming for?

jamiea commented 9 years ago

+1 that @sometimesmotion but I don't feel that's where we're going with an 'Accessibility' competency.

There's a social argument here in the U.K. I agree with, that 'accessibility' is a semantic dirty-bomb. So I was disappointed to see how the w3 have strengthened it's use over the last couple of years by making it more encompassing in it's definition. That doesn't dilute it as a term for me, however I acknowledge that it's a word with long established practical meaning in terms of web production so it can't be abandoned. As my preference was for an 'Inclusivity' type competency that had a broader scope than accessibility, still highlighting it but also including designing for specific devices etc., Now I'm consoling myself that I'm always free to fork it myself!

Great work otherwise folks on the skills

dajbelshaw commented 9 years ago

Great work all! So far we've got:

Thanks for the input @jgmac1106 and @jamiea. And to answer @sometimesmotion's question while I thank him, I think we're inspired (but not tied to) the ideas of universal design.

Keep the ideas coming on this, and other, threads! :)

dajbelshaw commented 9 years ago

Closing this in favour of issue #19