Welcome to the A11Y Project

[davatron5000]

Thanks so much for your interest in helping make the web more accessible. Welcome and I'm so glad you're here. This site is as much yours as it is mine.

So the pitch:
I've been making web sites for over a decade now but web accessibility (A11Y) still seems to be the area where it's most difficult to grasp best practices. Furthermore, when you search for information, it's buried in long posts. I want to make A11Y easier to digest so that designers and developers can make more easily these considerations and make the web a better place.

Awhile back I created a list of ~40 simple posts on A11Y that I would love to see written. It's by no means the end-all-be-all, but it should be straightforward on the type of posts I'm after: small, topical and friendly.

And because this is all on Github, information can always be the latest and have the input of the whole web. Here's a list of people who said they were interested or have mentioned it in the past:

@Wilto
@ianhamilton
@bryanstedman
@sturobson
@susanjrobertson
@mattmcmanus
@grayghostvisuals
@joshualong
@jasonrhodes

The site isn't ready for launch yet by any means, so keep it a bit of a secret right now. I'll start logging issues that I have with the site at the moment and assign some to myself and start clearing them out.

If you are jekyll and github savvy and you'd like to become an admin, just post an

Thanks again for helping,
Dave

[davatron5000]

Want: A better taxonomy and categorization of those posts would be good.

• Basics
• Quick Tips
• How-tos
• Assistive Technology
• Videos
• Myths

Anything else?

[ianhamilton]

I think the myths / misconceptions is a really important thing to have in there still.. although could potentially just be a single post under basics

[davatron5000]

@ianhamilton Awesome! Forgot that. Added!

[mattmcmanus]

I'm excited about this! I've been focusing on the backend for the last couple years and have let my A11Y skills wither.

As for the taxonomy, I like how in your post list you have the "Intro to concepts" section. Maybe Basics can be changed to Standards & Concepts?

Also, I've got a couple (2) jekyll-sites-hosted-on-github under my belt. I'd be happy to try and help where I can.

[grayghostvisuals]

Hey Dave!

I am indeed jekyll and github savvy and would like to become an admin por favor O_o
I would like to incorporate bits of what I have from my accessibility checklist and ultimately remove it entirely rom Github
so that this information is not doubled up. Something for the issue tracker wizards. Lookin' forward to this project! Have
a super weekend!

Cheers!
-Dennis

Sincerely,
Dennis Gaebel
585.944.9406
Gray Ghost Visuals LLC.
http://grayghostvisuals.com
grayghost@grayghostvisuals.com

On Jan 11, 2013, at 8:46 AM, Dave Rupert notifications@github.com wrote:

Thanks so much for your interest in helping make the web more accessible. Welcome and I'm so glad you're here. This site is as much yours as it is mine.

So the pitch:
I've been making web sites for over a decade now but web accessibility (A11Y) still seems to be the area where it's most difficult to grasp best practices. Furthermore, when you search for information, it's buried in long posts. I want to make A11Y easier to digest so that designers and developers can make more easily these considerations and make the web a better place.

Awhile back I created a list of ~40 simple posts on A11Y that I would love to see written. It's by no means the end-all-be-all, but it should be straightforward on the type of posts I'm after: small, topical and friendly.

And because this is all on Github, information can always be the latest and have the input of the whole web. Here's a list of people who said they were interested or have mentioned it in the past:

@Wilto
@ianhamilton
@bryanstedman
@sturobson
@susanjrobertson
@mattmcmanus
@grayghostvisuals
@joshlong

The site isn't ready for launch yet by any means, so keep it a bit of a secret right now. I'll start logging issues that I have with the site at the moment and assign some to myself and start clearing them out.

If you are jekyll and github savvy and you'd like to become an admin, just post an

Thanks again for helping,
Dave

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[davatron5000]

@grayghostvisuals Awesome! I think a responsive (i.e. Tablet) check list would be awesome maybe we bounce that out into a separate conversation.

[grayghostvisuals]

@davatron5000
Sounds good 👍 see you in the trenches

[Wilto]

[davatron5000]

About to push up 3½ articles. Getting really close to looking professional.

[grayghostvisuals]

🎆

[thomassjogren]

Hello folks.

I got around yesterday to check out your work so far and it looking really nice. I'll start contributing as much as I can so the word about better accessibility in a simple way can be spread 😄

Btw. If you are interested there is a short presentation of myself on https://github.com/thomassjogren/Random/blob/master/Presentation.md

[davatron5000]

¡Okay, Amigos! We're getting real close to launch. My goal is Noon Texas Time (~1hr).

My current To-Dos are:

• Build out the About page a little more
• Tweak some posts & categories
• Post blog post on my site

Stuff I'd love help on:

• Make sure the README.md is awesome (first impressions matter)
• Make CONTRIBUTING.md better?

I think our contributing workflow is working like this:

1. Make a Gist
2. Start a conversation about it in an issue
3. Roll the article in yourself via a pull request OR ask someone to help you.

Thanks, everyone! It's a dream to see this coming together. You all are heroes!

[susanjrobertson]

@davatron5000 I'm wondering if the contributing may be intimidating for folks that are non technical but have a lot to say about color contrast and other issues? Should that be a bit more robust? Or are we expecting everyone to be familiar with github since they are coming to the site? Just thinking out loud of some things I thought of as I read it.

[davatron5000]

@susanjrobertson Feedback should be on Github issues (so we can all see). If you have any ideas about guiding people, please do them!

Posts or submissions or whatever can be done in anything, we just need a link to text. Gists are easy like text documents and you can comment on them, so I recommend them.

[grayghostvisuals]

@susanjrobertson The README for this repo now links to the contributing docs which also reference this issue for article submissions and discuss the procedure. If it's not clear enough let me know.

[Wilto]

Maybe we say that Gists are “preferred,” but we point people at a simple text… thingie like oksoclap.com, just in case?

[davatron5000]

Alright team! We're ready to launch! Here's my blog post: http://daverupert.com/2013/01/simple-accessibility/

🎆 🎆 🎆 Congrats, everyone! You all did great. Let's keep up the momentum, but let the tweeting commence 🎆 🎆 🎆

[susanjrobertson]

@Wilto - I think that's a great idea. thanks @grayghostvisuals :)

And way to go @davatron5000 and everyone else.

[kevinSuttle]

@davatron5000 How would you like to add contributions of found articles? I have a few recent ones that could be linked to that others have written.

[zachattack]

@davatron5000 I am exposing my newb qualities but, can you add a mention in the install README that tells you to check http://localhost:4000/ when the server starts up? Never used Jekyll before it took me a moment to suss that out. If not no biggie.

[grayghostvisuals]

@ zachattack great point. will do

[thomassjogren]

@grayghostvisuals it's done. 😄

[grayghostvisuals]

@thomassjogren WTG gunslinger!

[zachattack]

@grayghostvisuals @thomassjogren very thank you. ;)

[elderhsouza]

Awesome idea guys, very sensitive and relevant issue. I'm wondering if you guys have plans to localize all that content, I would really love to help translate it to brazilian portuguese for example, after all that's a global issue right?
What do you guys think?

All the love for you guys, awesome work!

[grayghostvisuals]

@elderhsouza

Call me crazy, but if you can make it in other languages...well that's just good accessibility now isn't it.

[elderhsouza]

@grayghostvisuals

My thoughts exactly! I'm thinking more about the logistics of that tough, sure it can be done, but what may be the best practice here? I know Jekyll does not support multi-language blogs at least not natively, but I've came across implementations like this one for example:
http://www.sp4ce.net/site/2011/01/15/how-to-have-a-multilingual-website-with-jekyll.html

If we can implement something like this, I think it's better than to just clone the project and translate every bit of text, maintenance would become impossible in a matter of days.

Other issue is how to keep track of the content to be translated, probably it will be relatively easy to find people to translate to various languages, but then again, lots of content, lots of languages, lots of 'translators', it's the type of situation that can get messy rapidly, if not implemented with care and forethought.

Does anybody here have any kind of experience that would help us address this localization issue?

[nattarnoff]

I've implemented Spanish translated sites in PHP/ASP in two different
manners.

1. Through a JavaScript proxy on a new URL (e.g. es.a11yproject.com). We
   used a 3rd party to do this, they handled translation.
2. All content was pre-translated (from the same company), and the content
   stored in an array or database (depending on size of site) and we pulled
   the appropriate content by picking the language.

I don't think #2 makes sense in this case, but maybe there is a method in
the first one that could be used.

On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 9:38 AM, Elder Henrique Souza <
notifications@github.com> wrote:

@grayghostvisuals https://github.com/grayghostvisuals

My thoughts exactly! I'm thinking more about the logistics of that tough,
sure it can be done, but what may be the best practice here? I know Jekyll
does not support multi-language blogs at least not natively, but I've came
across implementations like this one for example:

http://www.sp4ce.net/site/2011/01/15/how-to-have-a-multilingual-website-with-jekyll.html

If we can implement something like this, I think it's better than to just
clone the project and translate every bit of text, maintenance would become
impossible in a matter of days.

Other issue is how to keep track of the content to be translated, probably
it will be relatively easy to find people to translate to various
languages, but then again, lots of content, lots of languages, lots of
'translators', it's the type of situation that can get messy rapidly, if
not implemented with care and forethought.

Does anybody here have any kind of experience that would help us address
this localization issue?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/1#issuecomment-12948061.

[grayghostvisuals]

@elderhsouza Let's move this into the issue tracker please. 👍
Closing the project Welcome Issue Tracker. Its been a good one ladies and gents! onward!