Encourage Diversity: For people with disabilities

Encourage Diversity: For people with disabilities

The chart is showing contributors by age, gender, education, relationship and family. But what about disabilities? Blind and deaf users benefit greatly from the internet and could so from Wikimedia projects. But we have no figures on them. I strongly encourage making Proposal:Create an accessibility committee a top priority.

Lecartia16:31, 5 May 2010

Serving the disabled is indeed important. Are you talking about a formal committee or an ad hoc group of volunteers. If the latter, I'd encourage you to form a Task force. You can do a lot of preliminary research, and you could easily formalize later.

Eekim21:05, 5 May 2010

I’m rather thinking about a formal committee. We started some kind of taskforce already, the Wikimedia Accessibility Initiative, and there always have been local initiatives. But volunteers can only do so much. Accessibility needs to be incorporated in the official strategy, we need people dedicated to this full-time.

Lecartia06:42, 6 May 2010

I'm glad there's a committee already; it's an excellent first step, and I'm looking forward to seeing what emerges from it.

I hope that this group will think at a movement-level. In other words, don't just think about what the Wikimedia Foundation can do to improve accessibility. Think about what partners the community at large could do.

Eekim22:51, 11 May 2010
 
 

It would be interesting to explore what solutions people with disabilities could benefit from, and how such solutions could be implemented.

Dafer4510:54, 6 May 2010

Indeed. For example, I am thinking about sign language avatars or videos to make Wikipedia articles accessible to deaf users. But in order to come up with improvements, we first have to acknowledge that we are lacking accessibility for a lot of users, then we have to get experts on this matter and let them investigate with real users with disabilities. The same way you involve users into usability testing. We can all make educated guesses, but that won’t help much. The WMF could either hire accessibility professionals and/or cooperate with companies such as The Paciello Group or SSB BART Group and organizations such as the American Foundation for the Blind.

Lecartia11:07, 6 May 2010

As I said to Seb35 on Proposal_talk:Create_an_accessibility_committee. I think there is a great opportunity here to create a task force for exploring what such a committee would do!

Dafer4520:31, 6 May 2010

Local accessibility projects (mostly en:Wikipedia:WikiProject accessibility and fr:Wikipédia:Atelier accessibilité) provided enough examples of what volunteers can do about accessibility. The community plays a central role in accessibility as they are the one to produce most of the content. And the community proved to be able to make accessible contributions when given appropriate tools and guidelines.

But it also pointed out the limits of a solely volunteer and community driven approach. The community lack expertise about accessibility, so project members are making a lot of mistakes and are not thorough enough. The English speaking WikiProject accessibility needs to be lead by an accessibility expert in order to do a good job.

MediaWiki's accessibility is not being improved. Developers cannot make accessible developments without the help from an accessibility expert, and are often making mistakes that worsen accessibility (for example, Vector was a huge regression in accessibility). And when they are given good advices, they often lack time to actually improve accessibility (even when the changes are easy to make). There is a need to employ an accessibility expert. The accessibility expert would provide advice to developers during the developments process, in order to conform to the most important accessibility requirements early in the developments process. The accessibility expert would also work on top priority accessibility improvements to MediaWiki and enable users to produce accessible content (en:ATAG approach).

In conclusion: we already made enough progress within the community. Now we need involvement from the WikiMedia Foundation in order to do a good job.

Dodoïste20:21, 19 September 2010

If the disability is mental and makes 1 understand less then simple english wikipeida serves for that. Mcjakeqcool Mcjakeqcool 23:17, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Mcjakeqcool23:17, 30 December 2010