RFC 89 - ATAG 2.0 audit

[thibaudcolas]

View the audit in HTML. View the audit in standardised ATAG reporting formats on GitHub Gists.

Cite this audit report with a permanent link: wagtail.org/accessibility/atag-audit/

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Thank you to the Wagtail accessibility team @wagtail/accessibility for the foundational work that made this audit and report possible. It’s a big deal for us that we finally have this first audit, so THANK YOU @Scotchester @thibaudcolas @jessemenn @kbayliss @Stormheg @SaptakS @anujaraj @janehughes @albinazs @laymonage @jams2. Also thank you to my employer Torchbox for sponsoring this audit and associated reporting.

Additional thanks to @albinazs, @jams2, @laymonage, @thibaudcolas, and @nicklee for their work on Wagtail’s first ever accessibility checker (https://wagtail.org/blog/introducing-wagtails-new-accessibility-checker/), which was essential for us to (partly) meet B.3. and B.4. guidelines.

And finally thanks to people who provided early guidance on conducting ATAG audits in the web-a11y Slack in the #atag channel! This has been an invaluable source of information for us to figure out how to go about this.

[thibaudcolas]

I’ve now updated the audit, with one year’s worth of Wagtail releases, bug fixes and improvements, and a better understanding of ATAG. For people who want to see the before-after details, diff is here: cacedcf.

Highlights

At a super high level, across all success criteria we’ve gone from 22 "Pass" and 28 "Fail" to… 28 "Pass" and 22 "Fail" 🎉. More than 50% "Pass"!

The biggest improvements here are:

• @Chiemezuo’s work on contextual alt text as part of Google Summer of Code.
• @waju-ire’s work on accessibility features documentation as part of Outreachy
• Our collaborative accessibility team’s work on the accessibility checker’s alt text validation, implemented by @albinazs
• Generally excellent work to make sure newly-introduced features are conceived and built per accessibility best practices.

Onwards

Does it still make sense for this RFC to be reviewed and approved or should I just close it? Not sure. For now, I’ve taken the time to curate our existing WCAG 2.2 and ATAG 2.0 backlog to track specific WCAG and ATAG success criteria. And here are my three "top of the list" issues that I think would have the biggest impact on accessibility of Wagtail websites:

• Django’s Fixed 32819 -- Established relationship between form fields and their errors. #17520. Essential to meeting B.2.4.1 Accessible Template Options (WCAG)
• User documentation on how to produce accessible content (Guideline B.4.2: Ensure that documentation promotes the production of accessible content).
• Feature request: Support for declaring language on elements in rich text. Essential to meeting B.2.1.1 Accessible Content Possible (WCAG).