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.
Thanks for this. I am certain that many of our volunteers would be interested in helping an accessibility project.
I think it worth noting that as accessibility projects have been running within Wikimedia for some years, this is no longer "getting the ball rolling", but more making people aware that we support and are open for new proposals.
Those interested in reading up on work done within our movement both recently and in past years can find existing resources and other motivated Wikimedians at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Accessibility and https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Accessibility.
This is not a UK specific project, so I suggest any new projects should include global cooperation as a prerequisite. It may be useful to ask those leading long running Wikimedia Accessibility projects to help with assessment of any proposal.
Thanks, Fae
On 13 January 2014 15:43, Jon Davies jon.davies@wikimedia.org.uk 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. -- Jon Davies - Chief Executive Wikimedia UK. Mobile (0044) 7803 505 169 tweet @jonatreesdavies
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On 13 January 2014 15:43, Jon Davies jon.davies@wikimedia.org.uk wrote:
https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Accessibility_of_the_Wikimedia_UK_website
While I applaud the initiative - and am happy to contribute my effort to making the WMUK wiki as accessible as we aim to do for Wikipedia and other WMF projects - I note that that page says "Elements of this page re-use copyrighted material from the Royal National Institute of Blind People, with kind permission", while carrying a CC-by-SA licence.
Does their permission run to re-licence their content this way? And does WMUK policy differ from en.Wikipedia's, in this regard?
Thank you for spotting that, Andy. That should certainly not be listed as CC-BY-SA as it is copyrighted material that is used with permission. We will get that fixed.
Thanks and regards,
Stevie
On 13 January 2014 17:13, Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk wrote:
On 13 January 2014 15:43, Jon Davies jon.davies@wikimedia.org.uk wrote:
https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Accessibility_of_the_Wikimedia_UK_website
While I applaud the initiative - and am happy to contribute my effort to making the WMUK wiki as accessible as we aim to do for Wikipedia and other WMF projects - I note that that page says "Elements of this page re-use copyrighted material from the Royal National Institute of Blind People, with kind permission", while carrying a CC-by-SA licence.
Does their permission run to re-licence their content this way? And does WMUK policy differ from en.Wikipedia's, in this regard?
-- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
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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/
On Mon, 13 Jan 2014, Tom Morris wrote:
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).
Articles on en.wp about characters or writing systems sometimes have text and images of the same text to allow for people who don't have supporting fonts installed. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samekh and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_alphabet
The IPA charts appear to have been reorganised away from columns for images and text of the same character since I last looked, which is an improvement. The mouseover text for all IPA characters appears to be "representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" though, which is not useful though.
Chris
---- Chris McKenna
cmckenna@sucs.org www.sucs.org/~cmckenna
The essential things in life are seen not with the eyes, but with the heart
Antoine de Saint Exupery
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