Accessibility of the triage process diagram

The Triaging tickets: Triage workflow documentation uses a lovely diagram, that needs accessibility improvements. Does anyone have interest or experience in diagram design / documentation accessibility, who could review this and propose changes, before we’d go ahead with opening a ticket?

Here’s the diagram:

We already have a pull request done to address basic legibility improvements: making the diagram bigger, and improving the color contrast of text: #18710. There are a number of remaining things I think might warrant other tweaks.

Image of text

Are there parts of the diagram we could convert as text content on the page? So we avoid showing the text within an image where it can’t be resized or customized.

Alt text

The current alt text, Django's ticket triage workflow, would be a good title but it’s not really a suitable alternative for the text within the image. Per WCAG SC 1.1.1 Non-text content, we need:

All non-text content that is presented to the user has a text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose

So my question is – does the other content further down the page qualify as this text alternative? If so – is there a need to programmatically associate it with the image.

Colors perception

The diagram makes heavy use of colors to distinguish different states, which will be an issue for colorblind contributors.

My recommendation there would be to make minimal changes to keep things simple?

  • Add a stroke-dasharray="4" to the Mergers arrows
  • Turn the “completed” green into a shade with different luminance.

Demo with the “status” fill set to hsl(120 100% 68% / 1) / #5cff5c (combined with 30% opacity) to simplify comparison, with a preview of the grayscale result:

Alt text

So my question is – does the other content further down the page qualify as this text alternative? If so – is there a need to programmatically associate it with the image.

I think we don’t have a complete explanation of the diagram in a neat place in the document although the information is roughly there in different places.

We could have the diagram be described by Triage Stages. I think updating the triage stages to explain the “next state” and who can do this would be enough. I would suggest updating the states:

  • Unreviewed to state that this is the status when a ticket is created and it will either be accepted or closed as invalid/wontfix/duplicate/needsinfo/worksforme (anyone can do this as a “ticket triager”)
  • Accepted to state that this changes to " Ready For Checkin" after a review when “the ticket has a patch that applies cleanly and includes all needed tests and docs. A merger can merge as is”
  • Ready for Checkin to state that the ticket is closed and resolved as fixed once a merger has merged the patch.

Colors perception

I like the dashed arrow :+1:

If it makes things easier, I think the “in progress” color is not required given this is already covered by the “Open” box. I think the status colors could be “Closed status” and just have colors for stopped and completed.

I don’t know how to do this, but maybe we could also box the stopped statuses.


fixed and completed feel like synonyms so might not need a box (but of course we could do that too)