Accessibility Sprint 2020

Making TYPO3 accessible is a mission to make the web a little bit better! You can help us with your development and UI/UX skills, accessibility know-how or your documentation or testing experience. The Accessibility Sprint will be an open remote sprint and everyone is welcome to join! 

Where: Online! The event will be remote due to the current COVID-19 situation.
We already have registrations from France, Germany, Austria, Hungary and the USA.
When: It will take place from October 21–23, 2020. 
Time: The times for the sprint event are scheduled according to Central European Time (CEST, UTC+2), additionally we try to allow as much collaboration as possible with our US participants in  EDT (UTC-4) timezone. You are also welcome to join us from a location in any other timezone and we will try to figure out a good solution.

Register as a Participant

Who is Organizing?

The event is organized by the TYPO3 Accessibility Team. The team was found in September 2020 as successor of the Accessibility Initiative. We provide information on accessibility and give the opportunity to discuss accessibility topics on a regular basis in our TYPO3 Slack channel #accessibility and the monthly TYPO3 Accessibility Hour. 

Our goal is to make TYPO3 accessible and improve the knowledge on accessibility for other TYPO3 developers. 

Current Status of TYPO3 Accessibility

While it is possible to use TYPO3 to create accessible websites, the TYPO3 editing interface is missing support for accessibility in some important places. As a starting point for the initiative, the TYPO3 pagetree was improved during the TYPO3 Initiative Week 2019. It now fully supports keyboard navigation following the best practices described in WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices 1.1. 

Since then, a user survey helped to get feedback from users and discover which parts of the TYPO3 backend were lacking in accessibility. As a result, multiple issues have been documented and some of them have already been resolved. There is a public custom query to show accessibility issues on Forge, the TYPO3 core issue tracker. 

Ideas & Goals for the Accessibility Sprint

We want to raise awareness for accessibility in TYPO3. Making TYPO3 more accessible will help every user of TYPO3, and is also a requirement for customers in the public sector, such as universities and governments.

During the sprint we will try to feature live tests by people with disabilities to get an insight into the major issues.

For TYPO3 itself, we will focus on several parts, and we plan to:

• Create developer guidelines for future improvements and education.
• Enhance consistency with TYPO3 backend components, such as Buttons and Tabs.
• Improve accessibility for the most important parts of the TYPO3 backend.
• Create accessibility tests integrated in the TYPO3 Core Bamboo testing suites to ensure the accessibility for future development.
• Create issues in Forge for all accessibility problems discovered during the sprint to have a collection of improvements to make after the sprint.

You’re Welcome to Join Us!

Join our sprint to make TYPO3 better for everyone, October 21–23, 2020. 

Register as a Participant

Questions?

To get in touch, please contact Michael Telgkamp, michael.telgkamp(at)mindscreen.de.