Re: HTML Accessibility Review

Hi Léonie, Xiaoqian, (Janina, APA,)

I've completed the accessibility review. Below you will find details of the results, including things that I've identified as potential concerns; questions about making contact, and feedback I have on reviewing the changes via GitHub and next steps for me, APA and us.

As I mentioned in my previous message, whilst I've now identified the areas of concern, we need to ask some questions before we can file issues to resolve the concerns, which is something we (APA) are and will be working on. Again, apologies I've not been able to file any issues yet - the review turned out to be much larger than expected.


// Making contact

I imagine it'd be helpful for me to write up my findings in a more approachable manner and email the concerns to public-html@w3.org for further discussion before we file issues, so I'll work on that write-up tomorrow.

In a number of PR threads, the WHATWG/a11y GitHub Team was mentioned. I can't reach their GitHub page [0] (though the only means to converse over GitHub is to file an issue, and I was hoping to ask some questions about our potential concerns before filing anything). I found a WHATWG wiki page about accessibility [1], which mentions an accessibility forum (though I'm not sure if this is what I'm after), however the link is broken.

We discussed this on the APA call yesterday and are working on finding contact details specifically for the WHATWG a11y group. I expect that the folks on the public-html list will also be able to help, and I know there’s significant shared membership between our groups, so perhaps some of the WHATWG a11y team are on that list already.


// Results and concerns

I didn't have any concerns about the accessibility-tagged PRs [2], but there are several of the other commits about which there are concerns, or potential concerns. Please find my results in the attached files (the PRs one repeated for convenience):

* Changes about which there are concerns can be found in review-concerns.html.

* Notes on changes from the initial PRs (and one related commit) can be found in review-notes-for-PRs.html (all OK).

* Notes on all the other commits can be found in review-notes-for-other-commits.html (again, all OK).

For reference, the parameters of the review were commits between the 8th of August 2017 (HTML 5.2 CR) and the 16th of July 2019 (latest WHATWG HTML review draft), where the commit summaries didn't begin with "Editorial: " or "Meta: " and including/also the commits for the PRs we discussed previously [2].


// Feedback on reviewing via GitHub

Some things I found...

* As all of the merges of PRs to master in the HTML repo are squash merges, GitHub provides a link back to the PR from the commit's page, which is very helpful. It's the link immediately after the first instance of the text "master" (i.e. the branch to which the PR was merged).

* For some PRs that introduce changes to the HTML spec, HTML-based diffs are provided by the pr-preview bot [3], so that it is possible to see the changes as final rendered HTML, as opposed to just the text-diff change. This is helpful, and the UI is pretty neat. I found some accessibility issues in the ones I experienced, though time has gone on since then, and there has been work on accessibility in the pr-preview repo. I intend to see if there's anything we can do to help.

* In order for the provided preview diffs to be up-to-date with the final state of the PR branch, it sounds (from comments I've read) like the branch needs to be rebased, and this is a manual thing. Need to look into this more.

* In many cases the diffs in HTML form were not provided though, which made it harder to review changes, as I could only look at text diffs on the "source" HTML file.

* In order to manage the large number of commits and track my notes, I wrote some scripts [4], which my be of help in future.

I'd recommend:

* Ensuring that all PRs contain up-to-date HTML diffs from the pr-preview bot (and that they're made accessible, if they aren't already).

* Checking all non-editorial, non-meta changes (filtered as above), as whilst it takes time, we found some concerns arising from them.


// Next steps

As mentioned above, I'll draft something for public-html@w3.org to discuss the concerns before filing issues, and see if that leads me on to the WHATWG a11y group.

Whilst that's going on, APA is looking into contact details for people on some of the issues (e.g. in WebVTT), but please reply here with anything you may think is relevant.

We look forward to working with everyone to resolve these concerns.

best regards,


Matthew

[0] <https://github.com/orgs/whatwg/teams/a11y>
[1] <https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Accessibility>
[2] <https://github.com/whatwg/html/pulls?q=is%3Apr+closed%3A%3E2017-08-08+closed%3A%3C2019-07-20+label%3Aaccessibility+sort%3Acreated-asc>
[3] <https://github.com/tobie/pr-preview>
[4] <https://github.com/matatk/review-scripts>
-- 
Matthew Tylee Atkinson
--
Senior Accessibility Engineer
The Paciello Group
https://www.paciellogroup.com
A Vispero Company
https://www.vispero.com/
--
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