Feedback needed: accessibility guidelines for contributors

Django Internals Accessibility
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:wave: Django’s accessibility team is looking for feedback on proposed guidelines for contributors: Accessibility guidelines for all contributors #17338 (read the guidelines as HTML).

Django’s accessibility currently leaves a lot to be desired. It’s crucial for us to introduce those guidelines, and crucial for the guidelines to be strict enough to allow us to improve, while not being an unfair burden for contributors working on UI changes, which is challenging enough as it is. We need feedback from people with different perspectives to make sure this will work for everyone.

How you can help

Two ways!

  1. Read the guidelines on the preview page or on pull request #17338. Provide your feedback here or in GitHub – both “general sentiment” comments and specific issues / possible improvements are very welcome.
  2. Share this forum thread or my tweet about this with your colleagues, friends, enemies so they provide feedback as well. Have them sign up to the forum to reply here, or provide their feedback on the PR.

We’re looking for feedback from all contributors, in particular new contributors and people who could see themselves contributing in the future. We also want feedback from @steering_council members, who have a formal mandate to oversee the quality of Django.

Why we need those guidelines

Lots of reasons. Formally, the introduction of those guidelines is as per DEP-11. Excerpt from the team’s responsibilities:

  • Deciding on any relevant accessibility guidelines to follow, such as WCAG, and at which conformance level. […]
  • Coordinating […] the improvement of the accessibility in general in Django and associated projects. […]
  • Writing and maintaining documentation relating to accessibility, such as a statement of commitment to accessibility issues, and contribution guidelines.
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I thought I’d bump this – in case people have been considering giving feedback but haven’t done so yet? All the feedback we’ve received so far has been very helpful.

The accessibility team is hoping to produce another draft ready for review / with all feedback to date addressed by the end of the year.

Guidelines usage beyond Django core

For context, I thought it might be worth highlighting how crucial those guidelines will be to achieving accessibility improvements outside Django core:

To help with the above, we intend to use those new contributor guidelines as the basis to:

Please do give it a go!

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