Accessibility issues

  • Ron,

    I’ve been working on making some changes to my sites to make them more accessible to people using screen readers and such, and I wanted to suggest that that might be a good thing to focus on in future updates — in particular, adding some options for creating landmarks to use for skiplinks and the like.

    One of the problems I’m running into is that as long as the home page shows multiple posts, there are multiple header and footer elements, since the plugin provides the option to add content before or after each post. That’s a really useful functionality I’m sure some people wouldn’t like to lose, but it presents some accessibility obstacles.

    It seems like Frontier would benefit from use of ARIA landmarks, so that, for example, I could designate the bottom-bar area as the contentinfo footer. Right now, I’m fighting with two different plugins to try to do that as a patch.

    I love Frontier — I’ve been using it for five years now — but it’d be great if there were accessibility provisions baked in, at least as advanced options. I don’t know how big a hassle that would be, but it seems like something worth considering.

    Thanks!

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Theme Author ronangelo

    (@ronangelo)

    I don’t really know much about accessibility and I don’t know when I’ll get some free time to study it.

    One of the problems I’m running into is that as long as the home page shows multiple posts, there are multiple header and footer elements, since the plugin provides the option to add content before or after each post. That’s a really useful functionality I’m sure some people wouldn’t like to lose, but it presents some accessibility obstacles.

    I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here. Also, what plugin are you referring to? Looking at your other post, do you mean this one: WP Accessibility? The skip links work fine as long as you input the ID of the area that you want to jump to.

    Thread Starter Ate Up With Motor

    (@ate-up-with-motor)

    The developer of WP Accessibility made the same point earlier today.

    I don’t have the technical skills to make sense of the WCAG standards or how to apply them, but my tentative suggestion would be to consider giving future versions of Frontier the ability to add ARIA attributes to different areas from the Frontier Options. It’s obviously an advanced feature, but it might be the best way to preserve the flexibility of the theme while making each user’s layout decipherable to screen readers.

    This is a new area for me as well and I’m still trying to get my head around it.

    There are theme guidelines for how to do accessibility. While these aren’t required guidelines, they can definitely be helpful. The specific concerns for ARIA landmarks are documented here:

    https://make.www.ads-software.com/themes/handbook/review/accessibility/required/#aria-landmark-roles

    That document is temporarily offline, pending approval of a minor edit – it’ll be back soon, though.

    Thread Starter Ate Up With Motor

    (@ate-up-with-motor)

    Thanks, Joe!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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