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Making Wagtail accessible

Work in progress

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Thibaud Colas, He/Him, @Torchbox��Slides: bit.ly/2Yf2Weo

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From the Wagtail 2.6 release notes:

Wagtail now aims for compliance with WCAG 2.1, AA level

Wagtail isn't fully compliant just yet, but we have made many changes to the admin interface to get there. We thank the UK Government (in particular the CMS team at the Department for International Trade), who commissioned many of these improvements.

Wagtail 2.6 release notes

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Why do we care about making Wagtail accessible

For users of assistive technologies, Wagtail’s admin interface is difficult to use (#4199).��For organisations choosing between CMSes, this might make Wagtail a bad option – because of legislation that mandates compliance with accessibility standards.

US: Section 508

UK: Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018

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More positive reasons to care

We want all Wagtail users to have a great experience, no matter how they use Wagtail.

We want people relying on assistive technology to be successful in the workplace.

We want to provide an inclusive experience.

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And it’s not just Wagtail

Intranet, CRMs, ERPs, dashboards. Django admin.

Internal tools shouldn’t compromise on accessibility just because their audience is smaller.

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What we* did

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We* = Beth Menzies, Katie Locke, Thibaud Colas, Helen Chapman, Jordan Bauer, Andreas Bernacca, people who reviewed PRs, people in #accessibility on Slack

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Targets: Compliance

WCAG 2.1, AA level

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Targets: Assistive technology support

NVDA on Windows with Firefox ESR

VoiceOver on macOS with Safari

Windows Magnifier & macOS Zoom

Windows Speech Recognition & macOS Dictation

VoiceOver on iOS, TalkBack on Android�

2016 GOV.UK assistive technology survey

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Tooling

Axe – Accessibility rules engine with support for WCAG & Section 508

Accessibility Insights – Browser extension with Axe and more

React Axe – Axe integrated directly in our UI components

Pa11y – Command line tool for accessibility checks with Axe & HTML_CS

GDS accessibility tools audit

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Tooling

Automated accessibility test suite with 100+ scenarios

Automated visual regression test suite, 87 scenarios (BackstopJS)

GitHub: thibaudcolas/wagtail-tooling

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Audit: UI overview

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Audit: results

340 different scenarios identified

190 (ish) scenarios tested

336 issues found by automated testing

A few more issues already identified manually (#4199)

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Let’s look at the issues

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Live auditing

bakerydemo-thibaudcolas.herokuapp.com/admin/Wagtail 2.5.1�User: wagtailspace, pw: threeten

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What issues can you spot? Focus indicator

Good example: great.gov.uk

  • Can you spot where the keyboard focus is?
  • Can you see parts of the UI where there is no focus indicator at all?
  • How many focus styles can we see here?

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What issues can you spot? Focus indicator

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What issues can you spot? Tab stops

Tab stops with Accessibility Insights, Wagtail 2.5.1

Good example: consumerfinance.gov

  • How many tab stops to reach the title field?
  • Bonus: what will be the first element to receive focus?

https://bakerydemo-thibaudcolas.herokuapp.com/admin/

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What issues can you spot? Tab stops

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What issues can you spot? Tab stops

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What issues can you spot? Color contrast

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What issues can you spot? Color contrast

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What issues can you spot? Using a screen reader

VoiceOver on macOS Safari, Wagtail 2.5.1

Backup: youtube.com/watch?v=f98wE4SwGLk

Search “VoiceOver accessibility testing: Wagtail 2.5 demo”

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What we fixed

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Many things

  • Better text-to-background color contrast across the whole CMS
  • Increased font size across the board as well
  • Added focus outline styles
  • Added more ARIA landmarks and refactored heading structure
  • Added a lot more contextual information to links for screen reader users
  • Fixed the icons implementation (more or less )
  • Fixed focus not moving to the pages explorer
  • youtube.com/watch?v=CELYUMFiuEQ
  • Search “VoiceOver accessibility testing: Wagtail 2.6 demo”

Wagtail 2.6 release notes

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What’s next

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A cultural change?

Accessibility should be part of the design & dev workflow for any UI changes, rather than an occasional one-off push

Contributors to Wagtail should have clear information on what to do to make sure they build accessible UIs

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Work in progress

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Thank you!

Let’s work on this together during the sprint?

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#accessibility on Slack�Slides: bit.ly/2Yf2Weo