Ideas from Bristol Wagtail Accessibility Sprint (Jan 2020)

[tomdyson]

• What are the alternatives to tota11y that we could include in this plug-in?
  • Axe-core is comprehensive, open source and up to date. But it’s a low-level API, exposed to the commercial (currently free) browser plug-ins.
    • There’s an open source Wordpress plugin for axe-core which is designed for content creators and looks roughly equivalent to the tota11y UI - see slides
    • axe-core is highly configurable - we could enable specific rules and checks based on user type, for example. We can easily output errors to the browser console but we’d need to build the UI ourselves.
  • https://tenon.io/ is apparently popular and well-respected, but I couldn’t get it to work. It’s a commercial server-side API - you POST a URL or a chunk of HTML to it.
  • WAVE is a popular web-based tool for identifying accessibility and Web Content Accessibility Guideline errors. It’s free for single page use - e.g. https://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://wagtail.io - but it’s not obvious how to check non-public pages.
  • Siteimprove is a commercial service which includes accessibility reporting. It provides integrations with several popular CMSs. Youtube demo of Drupal integration.
• How could we make wagtail-accessibility better?
  • is https://github.com/Khan/tota11y/ up to date in wagtail-accessibility? yes #8
  • Are there any options for tota11y that we could make configurable? no
  • We could make the visibility of wagtail-accessibility configurable, based on user group (#10)
  • We could create a UI for axe-core violation reports (hard)
  • We could enable axe-core and output violations to the console (easy):

    <script src="https://unpkg.com/vue"></script>
    <script src="https://unpkg.com/vue-axe"></script>
    <script>Vue.use(VueAxe, { config: {} })</script>

[thibaudcolas]

Years later, here we are :) Introducing Wagtail’s new accessibility checker. And future plans: Looking for sponsorship – Accessibility checks for site administrators.

wagtail-accessibility still provides a lot of value as it has a very different feature set from what we ended up building directly in Wagtail