Forum .LRN Q&A: WAI WCAG accessibility standards compliance

1: WAI WCAG accessibility standards compliance

Posted by Michele Slocovich on 08/31/05 07:41 PM

Hello,

is anyone coordinating efforts to comply to these standards ?

we'd be interested in contributing to "clean" the code in order to reach _at least_ a priority 2 (AA) compliance for core dotLRN packages (and well... that implies openacs too).

there is a strong marketing aspect which drove our attention to it: italian public sector is now requiring something very close to WCAG 1.0 AA+ compliance (besides an evaluation from "someone" which has to be listed in some registry).

I think this will soon be the case (if already isn't) with all governments/universities and anything linked to the public sector.

I think this thread could be a starting point to coordinate efforts....

cheers

Michele

2: Re: WAI WCAG accessibility standards compliance (response to 1)

Posted by Rafael Calvo on 09/01/05 03:01 AM

Hi Michele

The issue of accessibility should probably be tackled at the same time as XHTML compliance and we can move forward with both while moving more to a CSS approach.

Please have a look at the theme work disucssed here:
https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=316047

cheers

rafael

3: Re: WAI WCAG accessibility standards compliance (response to 1)

Posted by Dorian Peters on 09/01/05 06:55 AM

An Accessibility evaluation was conducted by Tristan Kalnins-Cole last year. He produced a document listing what would need to be done to bring dotLRN up to A, AA and AAA compliance. It's available in HTML and for more detail, there's a printed version (check the dotLRN Accessibility Study thread - https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=207764)

At the last dotLRN conference in Madrid, Accessibility fixes were a major focus of the bug bash and a lot of things were fixed (like missing alt tags). I entered all the issues discovered by Tristan into the bug tracker, each labelled with the priority level it corresponds too. This should help if you guys are able to start fixing the left over issues. You can go through them in bug tracker.

I agree this is an important issue as compliance with standards, especially for Education, is required by law in many countries includidng the US, UK, Canada and Australia.

Hope this helps.

4: Re: Re: WAI WCAG accessibility standards compliance (response to 3)

Posted by Michele Slocovich on 09/14/05 01:51 PM

Hi Dorian,

I was in Madrid, but I somehow missed the followup to the bug bash.

Now, the are bugs listed in
https://openacs.org/bugtracker/openacs/?format=table&page=10&f%5fstate=7&orderby=submitter%2casc&project%5fid=56106
(sorted by submitter, browse to your name)

it's a total of 23 bugs, of which

3 for "A" level
9 for "AA" level
11 for "AAA" level

i wonder whether we could say dotlrn is at least "A" and put up the corresponding logo, at least on dotlrn site, by fixing those 3 bugs....

Something is quite weird here:
Bug #2445 - script was written to replace empty alt. (ehy i think i wrote this script, and it ran in madrid bug bash...!)

Bug #2449 Fix has been made. Just needs to be tested.

Bug #2450 Fix has been made. Just needs to be tested.

now... those are the 3 "A" level bugs.
hence it seems .LRN is already at a "A" level, still we don't know it... or maybe some last step has to be done...

opinions ?

thanks

5: Re: WAI WCAG accessibility standards compliance (response to 1)

Posted by Rafael Calvo on 09/14/05 11:49 PM

That would be great!
I would agree for 2.1.3, we are 'A' compliant.

I would test the basic things once we release 2.2 and the new templates, hopefully before the end of september. Hopefully we have not added new things to the list.

cheers

Rafael