[wp-accessibility] Twenty Ten

[Rich Pedley]

On 05/09/2010 15:09, Jane Wells wrote:
>    Hi Rich. It's great that you're taking initiative with this following
> the wpdevel discussion, but for anything that touches UI (link color,
> especially) it really needs to be coordinated with existing UI stuff. I
> have asked for volunteers before to do a separate admin theme that
> purely aimed at accessibility (much higher contrast, larger click
> targets, etc) but didn't get much response. We're going to be doing a
> CSS color sweep/cleanup in 3.1, so if you're changing link colors now,
> it's likely your patch will get overwritten without malicious intention.

Well remember that so far I'm concentrating on the theme and front end 
output, as opposed to backend/admin. Idea being that it will help 
ensure a process is developed(for me!), and for me to see how well 
changes get accepted by others.

Up next would probably be forms or adding in skip links or 2.

> Also, I know it seems silly, but each change should really be it's on
> patch. Better to have a patch of only a line or two that has a single
> function, so that if something has to be reverted, all the other changes
> don't get lost with it. Like in this example, if we needed to revert
> link color changes b/c they weren't approved UI changes, but we didn't
> want to lose newly-added labels or something, with it being one whole
> patch there would be an issue.

Well I can split the current patch down into portions, though remember 
it is so far just changes to the CSS. You'll find that a lot of 
accessibility 'fixes' need changes elsewhere. So it's not always easy 
to split it down into smaller chunks. Having said that... I think the 
patch can be split into 3 or 4 smaller ones, at least I will try to. 
At least that way I can perhaps better add the reasoning for each change.

But...

if one patch is rejected, it may then have a knock on effect to 
others, so they would all have be interlinked by some method.

An example is the Gallery CSS changes I made. This was changing the 
padding because a 10px border on an image was giving me an ugly red 
10px border on the focus and hover states. So that change was 
necessary to accommodate image link highlighting.


> Also, if you were just going through and adding under-the-hood things
> for screen readers, etc., that would be fine to do independently, but it
> appears you are actually changing design things--colors,
> margins/padding, highlights--and these are not things that get changed
> lightly. The theme designer (since it is 2010 you're working on now)
> needs to be involved. Chances are he'd be fine with it, but actual
> changes to the UI need to run by him for design approval. I'll email him
> the ticket number you have listed below so he can weigh in and approve
> or identify any reasons he had for doing it the way he did.

ahh yeah understood, and thanks. if necessary I can work with him to 
improve accessibility without compromising his design.


> When you get
> to the admin, I would suggest working on an accessibility-specific admin
> color scheme first (which we would add to the existing blue and gray)
> rather than trying to patch the existing color schemes directly, as we
> can (and want to) approve a separate scheme fairly quickly, but changing
> the base UI for 20 million+ users is more political and takes longer.

Mind if I play Devil's Advocate here. A color scheme is only going to 
help a small portion of users. It would actually be far more important 
to ensure the markup is correct first. There are quite a few issues 
that would need to be addressed. (I'll skip the usual rant).

But a high contrast color scheme would be a good idea to start with, 
as there are less changes involved.

> If you intend to make changes that are visible in the UI, like adding
> elements on the screen and changing colors, you really should join the
> UI group and work through it there, so that your work doesn't get
> rejected as being out of alignment with the existing UI conventions. The
> UI group blog is at http://make.wordpress.org/ui and there are weekly
> IRC meetings on Tuesdays at 2:30pm in irc.freenode.net #wordpress-ui.

2:30pm? which timezone?

Are they purely for backend/admin or do they cover the default themes 
as well?

Rich