I, as yet, have no opinion on whether a website 'overlay' is a god idea or not; I've been away for a week or so and I've just read through this thread. I would caution against reinventing the wheel, though - accessibility has been a known issue on Wikipedia for many years, and some considerable effort has gone into making things more accessible.
"Wikis
aren't accessible" is one of those things people say, but nobody has yet provided anything concrete to explain that position. I'm the first to admit that the wiki format can't do everything, and that (contrary to the opinions of some of the format's more passionate advocates) it has its drawbacks, but nobody in his thread has explained what those drawbacks are in terms of accessibility. I've been using wikis for years, so I readily admit that I can't remember what it feels like for a first-time user. I'd really like to know if this is just one of those things that people say (in which case we can try to dispel an urban myth) or whether there is something about wikis tat makes them inherently inaccessible for readers.
As an aside, the rationale of the proposed 'overlay' is being couched in terms of accessibility, but the changes seem to be focused more on aesthetics, so I'm curious what the problem is that this 'overlay' would solve, and how it would solve it. I don't think it's a terrible idea by any stretch, but I'd like to see some informed discussion about what we're trying to fix and the best way to do that.
Thanks,
Harry Mitchell
Phone: 024 7698 0977
Skype: harry_j_mitchell
On Thursday, 12 June 2014, 11:17, Stevie Benton <stevie.benton@wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:
Some examples were discussed on the Wikimedia UK wiki a while back here -
https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Talk:Accessibility_of_the_Wikimedia_websites
One of our trustees, Carol Campbell, put together a really good paper on this, including some advice from the RNIB which we were given permission to use. I seem to remember that rather than focusing on the issue of accessibility, there was more discussion about whether we could use those elements of Carol's paper. It wasn't very productive, to say the least.