“I want to retire” #14
Description
The best place for accessibility fixes and enhancements is in core Leaflet. There are various benefits to this approach, including:
- Best fix with minimum amount of code,
- Included by default, and available to all,
- Less effort for implementers,
- More robust – keep accessibility enhancements/ fixes aligned with other code fixes and changes.
As with many open-source projects, there are possible barriers:
- Most / many contributors are working on Leaflet in their spare time, or on the margins of their time,
- Life events can intervene for any contributors (e.g. war!)
- Buy-in, attention and prioritisation from those with review and merge permission,
- Quality of pull requests/ contributions. For example, do they have unit tests? The greater the number of iterations, the higher the chance of contributors or reviewers losing interest, and breaking changes being introduced on the main branch,
- Fixes causing breaking changes.
Why a plugin?
There are some benefits to a plugin-based approach:
- Ability to support multiple, existing and future versions of Leaflet,
- Ability to work faster, with a lower barrier to accepting contributions,
- Ability to try out potential fixes, and iterate to improve them,
- Fixes in general don't cause breaking changes.
This plugin does NOT replace accessibility efforts in core Leaflet. Instead, It is a means to provide interim fixes, and potentially to test fixes.
The aim for this plugin is for it to become obsolete and to retire it, because sufficient accessibility fixes and enhancements have been made to core Leaflet.
Plugin Obsolescence == Success!