User:RexxS/Accessibility on the English Wikipedia

A review of current provision and issues on the English Wikipedia (hereafter: Wikipedia)

Overview

Wikipedia has WikiProject Accessibility, which "aims to make Wikipedia accessible for users with disabilities." There are editors who also attempt to ensure that Wikipedia is accessible in the broader sense, that is, also available to visitors who have outdated hardware and software or have very low bandwidth connections - a not uncommon situation in the developing and third world.

Wikipedia has a Manual of Style that documents consensus on issues of style. That has a sub-section on accessibility providing guidance on accessibility issues.

The disabilities that are of primary concern are associated with visual disadvantage, although it is recognised that videos and sound files pose problems for visitors who are deaf or hard of hearing. Visual impairment includes blindness (either from birth or in later life), reduced acuity, and multiple forms of colour-blindness.

There are many non-visual user agents available, but JAWS and NVDA are known to be used. Some visitors make use of text-to-speech addons to enhance their ability to read pages. The Royal National Institute of Blind People has recommended testing webpages with Lynx, a text-only browser that also serves as an illustration of how webpages may render on old equipment or low bandwidth connections.

Issues

The following are the principal issues and the degree to which solutions have been sought.

Structure

Articles and talk pages are structured through headings and sub-headings. These are well-understood and generally properly implemented to ensure that screen readers can recognise and navigate to sections of interest. Editors generally understand that heading levels must not be skipped and errors are normally fixed quite quickly.

Text

It is recognised that older readers in particular have difficulty in reading text that is substantially smaller than the normal font size used within an article. Guidance now recommends that text should never be reduced below 85% of normal size. This is badly understood by many editors who believe that changes to the user's css can remove the problem, missing the point that 99% of our visitors are not registered editors and do not have the facility to customise the css with Wikipedia-specific changes. There is also the fallacy that it can easily be compensated by the browser zoom, which ignores the inconvenience to the visitor of losing their place in the article every time that the browser zoom is changed. We should expect readers to have set a zoom which makes normal text (12.8px) comfortable to read on their monitor and screen resolution and not expect them to alter it to match tiny text that we have forced into an article.