Proposal: Accessibility statement

Help / Discuss
1

Hello!

Context

Next year the European Accessibility Act will come into application. As the provider of the XWiki product, the XWiki community should provide an accessibility statement in order to comply to the EAA requirements for most nations (BITV - Germany and RGAA - France among others). Complying to this requirement will be important for some users from a legal standpoint. We already agreed to best effort compliance to WCAG 2.2 and keeping an accessibility statement would be a pretty simple addition so that XWiki can comply to the EAA.

Proposal

I used the generator available at Generate an Accessibility Statement | Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) | W3C to generate the base for this proposal of accessibility statement:

<START OF THE ACCESSIBILITY STATEMENT PROPOSAL>

Accessibility Statement for XWiki

This is an accessibility statement from the XWiki Community.

Measures to support accessibility

The XWiki Community takes the following measures to ensure accessibility of XWiki:

  • Include accessibility as part of our mission statement.
  • Assign clear accessibility goals and responsibilities.
  • Employ formal accessibility quality assurance methods.
  • Include accessibility in our design and development practices.

Conformance status

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) defines requirements for designers and developers to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. It defines three levels of conformance: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA. XWiki is partially conformant with WCAG 2.2 level AA. Partially conformant means that some parts of the content do not fully conform to the accessibility standard.

Feedback

We welcome your feedback on the accessibility of XWiki. Please let us know if you encounter accessibility barriers on XWiki:

  • On our forum at https://forum.xwiki.org/
  • On our issue tracking system at https://jira.xwiki.org/

Technical specifications

Accessibility of XWiki relies on the following technologies to work with the particular combination of web browser and any assistive technologies or plugins installed on your computer:

  • HTML
  • WAI-ARIA
  • CSS
  • JavaScript

Limitations and alternatives

Despite our best efforts to ensure accessibility of XWiki , there may be some limitations.

Known limitations for XWiki are listed on our issue tracking system . Please contact us if you observe an issue not listed here.

Assessment approach

The XWiki Community assessed the accessibility of XWiki by the following approaches:

  • Self-evaluation
  • External evaluation

Evaluation report

Evaluation reports and statements for different versions of XWiki are available at: https://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/Testing/WCAGTesting/#HTestingSessions.

Date

This statement was created on 6 September 2024 using the W3C Accessibility Statement Generator Tool.

<END OF THE ACCESSIBILITY STATEMENT PROPOSAL>

The idea is to have this accessibility statement in our documentation, possibly at https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Documentation/UserGuide/Features/Accessibility/ (which is at the time almost empty and a WIP) and with a link in the footer of xwiki.org .

Conclusion

Do you agree with the concept of having an accessibility statement for our community?
What do you think about this proposal?
Is there some info you think is missing from this statement?
Do you think more contact options would be relevant? If yes, which ones?

Side notes

Note that this accessibility statement is not set in stone and will need to be updated from time to time in regards to our progress about accessibility. I tried however to keep it generic enough so that we wouldn’t have to maintain it too often.

This is a large process change in my opinion, but I doubt any committer would oppose the whole concept. If there happens to be a strong opposition or a lot of discussions about the details of this proposal I’ll open a VOTE to tackle this subject.

Thank you for your interest in the proposal!
Lucas C.

2

I don’t think it’s from the XWiki Community. I’d say it’s from the XWiki Core Developers.

3

Where is the mission statement? :slight_smile:

4

where are these defined?

5

shouldn’t this be linked to our doc on xwiki.org where we explain how we do automated tests for WCAG?

6

This also requires a proof.

7

I think we should mention that we aim to be fully compliant with WCAG 2.2 AA.

8

We could link to the jira issues labeled wcag (either opened or all).

9

s/here/there.

10

This requires some proofs (ie links to reports and explanation on how it’s done). For example how is the self evaluation done, what does it mean?

11

Yes, sounds good.

Needs to prove what’s written, see my comments above.

Maybe some more details on how to follow the WCAG tests we execute for each release.

1 Like
12

WDYM? What is changed from what we’re doing already?

Note: I think we need to officially vote/add the role of Accessibility Expert/Manager at https://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/DevelopmentPractices#HSpecialProjectRoles

13

+1

It’s a good start, but it’s probably missing some links to the places where we detail our procedures and development practices related to accessibility, as Vincent noted.

Thanks,
Marius

14

+1

I’m waiting your answers about Vincent’s comment for current proposal. Now in general I’m ok if we go with a light policy that we amend/improve later on.

15

+1

16

Definitely

There are some specific points for clarification that were already pointed out. But in general, I like very much.

Seems good to me.

17

A. A lot of people outside of the XWiki Core Developers have already contributed to accessibility. One way that’s very common is reporting bugs :slight_smile: Of course XWiki core developers are especially impacted by this, but AFAIK the theme is something anyone in the community can help with. In my opinion this accessibility statement highlights the position of the community on the question and not just the position of the XWiki core devs.

B. My bad, I misunderstood this company Public Relation terminology and this does in fact not have a place here.

C.
Adding a link to https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Documentation/UserGuide/Features/Accessibility/ to the accessibility statement. When moving it in the doc, we’ll probably need to make it target the Goals paragraph instead of the whole page. I don’t think we have clear accessibility responsibilities set at a community level and I doubt it’d be useful to implement them, so I’ll remove it from the statement.

– We can also add the goal directly in our statement (as you proposed in a comment later on)

D. :+1:

E. From what I saw in other accessibility statement and templates, it’s not mandatory to add links to prove anything you’re stating. However we do have everything in public and already written so we might as well make use of it :+1:

F. :+1:

G. I hesitated to provide a filtered list of issues here, :+1: it’s okay with me to provide a more specific link.

H. I’m not sure I understand the terminology used in your comment. Should I replace here with there?

I. :+1: for links to reports
In my opinion the fact that devs are aware of common accessibility issues and regularly find and report them is some form of self evaluation. The tracking and categorization of wcag issues can be considered like a self assessment of the state of accessibility in XWiki. Its result will be different to the results any audit could give us, but still a valuable self assessment. The automated testing we have on CI is also a great self evaluation method.

J. This is a formal engagement that the community cares about accessibility to a certain point. It doesn’t change our practices but it makes it so that people can call us out if we don’t keep up with them (and don’t update our statement accordingly). It’s true that it was already the case since we had a community voted agreement, but this will be easier to look for and find for people from outside the active community.

Thanks for all your feedback :slight_smile:
I’ll share the updated proposal for the accessibility assessment in the next message.

The items where the discussion is not closed are A. H. and J.

18

No, you just can’t, simply because there’s no such thing as the XWiki community, and you can’t represent people and tell them what they should do or not do, and talk in their names…

Said differently, there are only individuals represented in the open source project, no groups, no business company, etc. Just individuals.

In addition, it’s impossible for someone who’s not a committer to agree with this as they have no power to enforce it. It’s just useless (and a lie).

What we can do is make this statement voted by by the xwiki core committers to follow it and enforce it. It’s voted individually and there’s a possibility of action (as they’re committers).

1 Like
19

Personally I don’t care what others are doing :slight_smile: What I care is that we don’t say lies or inaccurate statements and the way to show that we’re serious and following what we say is by providing proofs.

More specifically, on this point I think we need to discuss it and do several things before we can vote this point:

  • Add an Accessiblity Manager role (and elect someone)
  • Write down somewhere how we include accessibility in our designs
  • Link to our development practices for WCAG
  • Link to the accessibility automated tests
  • Check if SonarQube has some accessibility rules and if so, link to them and consider enabling them for us
20

yes since it doesn’t refer to the statement but to another page where the issues are listed.