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Wagtail’s 2023 Outreachy: projects report

In the December 2023 cohort, Wagtail joined Outreachy’s open source internships program with a focus on accessibility. We ran two projects.

For more background about the projects, read Wagtail’s Outreachy projects in 2023.

Wagtail website accessibility

Sherry blogged about her project on the Wagtail blog: Making wagtail.org more accessible. Here is my formal report per Outreachy requirements.

Summary of the project goals completed

Primary goals:

  • Accessibility audit planning: 100% completed, selected 6 representative pages to test with 11 different types of testing
  • Accessibility testing: 100% completed – found 47 different issues. See https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/discussions/11305 for full details of audit
  • Accessibility audit report: 85% completed – executive summary available in GitHub (https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/discussions/11305#discussioncomment-8383881), spreadsheet fully completed, 21 issues still to be moved to the GitHub backlog
  • Implement accessibility improvements: completed fixes for 18 out of 20 issues earmarked for fixing within the scope of the project

Secondary goals:

  • Exploring accessibility best practices: done for print stylesheets, WHCM, APCA color contrast, hgroup element
  • Sharing best practices with the community: completed: sharing audit methodology & findings, discussions within accessibility team meetings. Work in progress: final project blog post or blog post series to report on the work, participation to upcoming community webinar

Stretch goals:

Impact the project will have on the open source community

Thanks to this project, we have an excellent sense of how accessible our main website is – and a clear path towards fixing all known issues. We’re aware of where there are potential blockers / major issues for us to prioritise, and can use this information to inform future project plans.

With all of this work being done in the open, we also have a solid case study of what it looks like to improve the accessibility of a website built with our software, and a good sense of what issues to look out for in other projects.

Finally, with Sherry being keen to write a detailed project report and to appear on our community webinar at the end of the project, this will further build up our profile as being an accessibility-focused project.

What your intern learned during the internship

  • Accessibility audit planning
  • Accessibility testing
  • Working within an accessibility team
  • WCAG 2.2
  • Screen reader testing: Talkback, NVDA
  • WHCM / Contrast themes
  • Print stylesheets
  • Technical writing
  • Accessibility audit reporting
  • Stakeholder presentations
  • Django / Python tooling
  • Node front-end tooling
  • Git & GitHub
  • Django Templates
  • ARIA
  • Next.js, React, TypeScript
  • CSS modules

Accessibility features documentation

Ahmed shared his experience on the Wagtail blog: Technical writing, asking for help, and other things I learned during my Outreachy internship.

Here is the headline improvement from his work, our new Accessibility features documentation page. It covers the following features:

  • Global navigation
  • Skip link
  • Collapsible sections
  • Session time limit
  • Text search
  • Edit screen features
  • Page-level keyboard shortcuts
  • Mini-map
  • Editing of headings and elements nesting in rich text fields
  • Live preview
  • Command palette
  • User account preferences
  • Profile settings
  • Notification settings
  • Browser-level user interface settings
  • Sidebar expanded/collapsed
  • Rich text toolbar pinned/unpinned
  • Mini-map expanded/collapsed
  • Side panel

A personal highlight for me was Ahmed’s excellent use of interviews for us to better understand the needs of our users and stakeholders.

Up next

See you over at wagtail/outreachy once we’re ready to start our 2024 December cohort participation!