[wp-accessibility] status of efforts to improve WordPress Accessibility

[Jennifer Sutton]

Hello:

While I understand that the list is being phased out, I thought 
perhaps I'd respond to a few points.

><snip>




>I really appreciate you wanting to help. We can use it, for sure. 
>I'd also love to hear what has come from the ATAG working group that 
>we should be paying attention to, in particular. The W3C has asked 
>us to provide feedback, but most of us don't have the time or 
>knowledge to be able to do that effectively.
>
>JS:  Has anyone contacted the ATAG  Working Group to ask for further 
>guidance and support?

There may be members of the WG who have worked with WordPress.

I'll presume not and will do my best to bring this response and 
Lynn's to their attention, along with the thread on the site.


Further, givenn the many comments on the blog from accessibility 
experts with direct experience with WP and WCAG, I'm not sure it's 
necessary to delay action until there's been a detailed analysis 
against ATAG.  I'm hopeful that someone has taken those comments and 
will be putting them into Trac in ways that make sense to WP's different teams.

I can imagine it might be easy to be overwhelmed when input is 
solicited, but offering people specific guidance as to how best to 
provide input might help WP accessibility to gain the traction it 
needs to in order to reach its full potential  both for site 
administrators as well as for site visitors.

In my experience, the use of Trac should not be too much of a barrier 
for the kind of experts you need at this point, but what will 
continue to be an obstacle is a lack of awareness of how to 
contribute to the community effectively.

I did a quick Google search of ATAG and WP, and I can see that a 
number of evaluations have been done over the years. But they've been 
done in presentations, on people's blogs, etc., etc.  This kind of 
fragmentation of effort isn't serving the WordPress community.

I've been following this issue for quite a while, have an extensive 
collection of bookmarks, but have never found a centralized place 
within the WP working teams' framework where people's efforts are 
collected and parsed appropriately.

When the list is closed, can it be closed in such a way that the last 
post includes a link to a blog post on what the next steps should be?

I look forward to monitoring the blog, to contributing what I can, 
and to pointing other experts I know to the WordPress activities.

Best,
Jennifer