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Jon Davies wrote:
https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Accessibility_of_the_Wikimedia_UK_website
This paper has been written by Carol Campbell a trustee of Wikimedia UK. She is very interested in 'getting the ball rolling' on issues around accessibility on Wikipedia and all other wikis. She is fairly certain that this is not the first time these issues have been raised but would like to commit to bringing together people interested in finding answers to some of the challenges she is raising. Please add your names below and offer any background or insights you may have. Thanks.
I just looked through the document.
Colour and colour contrast are all reasonable points. Wikimedia sites have had a nasty habit of relying only on colour (usually of a low contrast) for semantic purposes, usually because Wikipedia template creators don't really ever think about accessibility.
Image alt text is a hard skill to get right. MediaWiki supports it using the `alt` parameter on images, but it's different from a caption. They serve a different function: an alt text describes the image as an alternative to seeing the image while a caption supplements the image.
As for image maps: there's only sixty image maps on English Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_image_maps
I expect there are none on WMUK, nor should there be. They should be a very rare thing indeed.
Images of text shouldn't happen... except sometimes there is a very good reason to. For instance, if it's text in an ancient language that we have yet to produce a text representation of (although Unicode *does* have ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs).
The multimedia sections are fine, but the advice is oriented towards organisations who have the resources to produce text alternatives. Wikimedia doesn't have those resources. Volunteers aren't exactly queuing up to transcribe videos.
Working out how we reach a certain quality of accessibility using volunteers is hard. There's also a utilitarian line to be drawn here. Per pound spent or volunteer hour spent, is it more important to ensure that, say, Wikimedia UK's website is accessible, or is it more important to ensure Wikipedia is accessible? I'd suggest that perhaps there might be more value in worrying about the accessibility of the project sites rather than the chapter site.
- -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/