Talk:Accessibility of the Wikimedia websites

This paper has been written by Carol Campbell a trustee of Wikimedia UK. She is very interested in 'getting the ball rolling' on issues around accessibility on Wikipedia and all other wikis. She is fairly certain that this is not the first time these issues have been raised but would like to commit to bringing together people interested in finding answers to some of the issues she is raising. Please add your names below and offer any background or insights you may have. Thanks Jon Davies (WMUK) (talk) 15:39, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

I am interested in helping on these issues

• Richard Symonds (WMUK) (talk) 16:09, 13 January 2014 (UTC)
• RexxS
• Please add your name

These are my thoughts

• I am very interested in how we can get around the problem of 'inline links'. For example, if I was to link to Google (click here), this isn't very useful. Wikis tend to do this all the time and it creates a real problem for the disabled. Richard Symonds (WMUK) (talk) 16:09, 13 January 2014 (UTC)
• I've been an active advocate for WikiProject Accessibility for several years, and I have considerable experience in web design and WCAG 1.0 & 2.0, as well as the accessibility problems specific to wikimedia software. --RexxS (talk) 16:31, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Alt tags for images etc

I support in principle all of the ideas set out in this paper, but, based on some significant time working on these things on and off wiki, have some concerns about the ways to make the improvements.

To take one example - ALT tags for images. I remember a campaign on wikipedia to make these a requirement for any article being nominated for GA or FA status. I spent many hours gradually learning to write descriptions of what could be seen in the image rather than just what the subject was. I nominated one (I think the first at FAC) and the descriptions were challenged on all sorts of grounds: not "neutral", not "verifiable", "original research" and similar. Others experienced similar concerns and the requirement for ALT tags was removed & seems to have languished ever since.

Having investigated captioning etc for educational videos, the labour intensive nature of the process was challenged by managers as not being "cost-effective" and falling outside "reasonable adjustments" as defined under the act - although this may have changed since.

Although I would agree that it is important for Wikimedia UK to work on improvements in this area, I would suggest that many of the features need should be built into the mediawiki software, which is presumably a very different issue.Rodw (talk) 16:37, 13 January 2014 (UTC)