To infinity and beyond (TMU); the power of open source and digital accessibility

CANHEIT 2024

Sa11y is an open source accessibility checker for content authors

Image: University of Minnesota

Sa11y

Sa11y is a…

• 100% free and open source
• Customizable
• Platform/framework agnostic
• Vanilla JavaScript
• Privacy oriented

…content accessibility checker.

History

Sa11y was originally developed as a custom accessibility checker for our content management system, AEM. Released internally fall of 2019, made open source in May 2020.

A few problems with enterprise cloud-based tools:

1. Most of these tools crawl and report issues on published content only.
2. Content authors require (lots of) training.
3. They flag too much.
4. They get very expensive. Pricing based on number of web pages.

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Poll

• Have you used an accessibility checker before?
• What tools are you using at your institution?

Shifting left

Cloud-based tools:

Create content ➡️ publish ➡️ sign in to third party tool ➡️ request new scan ➡️ review issues ➡️ go back and fix content ➡️ re-publish

Sa11y:

Create content ➡️ Sa11y ➡️ fix content ➡️ publish

Sa11y at TMU

blog.torontomu.ca | WP Multisite (153 active sites) | Since August 2023

Since Fall 2019

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Since Winter 2023

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Current month 3-4 of pilot. Few staff currently. Will be made available to instructors soon.

Multisite compatible plugin

Sa11y beyond TMU

Celebrating millions of requests via CDN

Average of 640k monthly requests since April 2023

Languages

Translations in French, Polish, Ukrainian, Swedish, Spanish, and German.

Machine translations via DeepL API: Bulgarian, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian Bokmål, Dutch, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Mandarin.

Open source means collaboration

Unofficial plugins

Consists of 45 councils in the UK and Ireland

Sa11y 🤝 Joomla CMS

As of April 2024, Sa11y is a core dependency in Joomla 5.1

• 1.8% of all websites with a known CMS use Joomla.
• About 1,144, 205 live websites.

Open source sparks innovation ��(and sometimes a little bit of friendly competition)

Editoria11y

Editoria11y is maintained by John Jameson at Princeton University.

• Similar tools, same audience, different look and feel, and slightly different philosophies.
• Features a dashboard in WordPress and Drupal.
• Sa11y and Editoria11y share most tests, and we’re always bouncing ideas around!

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Q&A?