G'day Dreamers, We want Dreamwidth to be as accessible as possible to people with any type or combination of disabilities. It's written into the Diversity Statement <http://dreamwidth.org/diversity.html> that people of all abilities are welcomed and I know it's something that is important to me personally.
1. I WANT YOU! If you have any disability or unusual characteristic that makes some web pages difficult for you to use, I WANT YOU! This means people with blindness, low vision, dyslexia, neurological oddities, autism spectrum issues, reading problems, keyboard-only users, mouse-only users, speech-only users ... anything that means some web pages are a pain in the ass to you more than to the Average Bear. You don't need to know anything about anything technical - as long as you can tell me *why* a page is hard for you, that'll do. Mostly I just need people who I can show a page to and you can say "it's cool" or "this is why it sucks". If you don't have any disabilities but you have knowledge about accesibility/usability related stuff, I want you too. Please email me - [email protected] - saying anything you think is relevant. Please put "DW Accessibility" in the subject line so I know who you are. This doesn't mean you're volunteering to *definitely* help, it just means you'll let me ask you if you can do stuff - most of it will probably be very short tasks (30 mins or less) and you can always say "no" to any of them. 2. Documentation There are some pages on the Wiki related to accessibility, at the moment they're a bit disorganised and overlap in some places: <http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Accessibility_Testing> - Preliminary brain-dump notes on everything we'll have to check/test to make sure the site as a whole is accessible to the greatest extent possible. <http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Accessibility_Wishlist> - Accessibility wishlist, mostly things I think LJ doesn't do well and DW can do better. <http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Accessibility> - General accessibility page, probably needs to be mostly split up and put into one of the other 2 pages. If you have thoughts on these things please add to the wiki at will. You don't need to wait to be asked - Just Do It. 3. Tell Us Even if you don't want to help with testing or documenting, please email me or the list with any accessibility concerns you have. It can be intimidating the jump into a project like this, I know all about that! If it's too difficult, just email me and we can chat about what's tough for you with web pages. 4. Can you code? We'll need some people who know LJ code to fix some of the accessibility stuff. This may not be done right away - probably won't be, for most of it - but it'll get done eventually. Afuna has already offered to help with coding stuff, but more eyeballs and fingertips are always welcome. 5. Screen Reader Users Wanted! One of the things I definitely want to do with accesibility testing is get people who use different screen readers to go over the site and tell us what's hard, what's dumb, what's inaccessible, what's annoying. So I'll need people who use JAWS, who use WindowEyes, who use VoiceOver, who use NVDA ... did I miss any? I'd also like at least one person who uses a braille display rather than speech output. So if you come into this category, or you have any friends who do, please please pretty please with sugar on top volunteer or bribe your friends into volunteering. We want this to be accessible for EVERYBODY. It's important because being left out really sucks. Cheers, Ricky -- Ricky Buchanan * [email protected] * http://notdoneliving.net/ ATMac - http://atmac.org/ - Apple products with a disability slant No Pity City - http://nopitycity.com/ - The best disability stuff in the galaxy! _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
