Talk:Wikimedia Fellowships/Project Ideas/The Accessibility Project
Connections with other people working on Wikimedia accessibility[edit]
Hello! I wanted to let readers know of
which lists people and organizations currently working on accessibility for the MediaWiki software and for Wikimedia in general. They might be good to consult to discover possible collaborations on this or related projects.
Best, Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Volunteer Development Coordinator 00:25, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
Existing audit[edit]
Jopparn, I infer that your proposed study would differ from the test report that Wikimedia Switzerland supported but I don't know enough about accessibility research to easily see how. Can you give a few details? Thanks! Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Volunteer Development Coordinator 00:28, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
- Hallo Sumana,
- Sorry for my late reply. I have been traveling for the last few days.
- The report mentioned above gives many valuable insights that no doubt will further the work with my proposed report. Especially regarding parts of the answers on the first bullet under the headline “Scope of Proposed Project” (which is the background part of the work so to say). However, in my opinion the report about German Wikipedia and my proposed report are complementary rather than overlapping. There are a number of things that my report would bring to the table:
- The first being that my report would be directed towards the Community at large and therefor will have to be more descriptive and informative about both the problems and beneficiaries in order to raise awareness (with handy summaries in the text). Some of the problems are already outlined in the report about German Wikipedia which is an excellent start, but it would be very beneficial to put this into context. The questions to be answered would be, for example, why is accessibility still a problem, for whom is it a problem and how big of a problem is it? The report would also lay the ground for all of the presentation material that I would need to create for Part 2 of the project. This type of a more descriptive and thorough presentation would be very much needed in order to clarify the problem of accessibility and to show to the Community that it is important to increase efforts in this area.
- Secondly, my report would include insights from ongoing WikiProjects and learn from their experiences and try to create blueprints, document standards and best practices, as well as summarize what existing guidelines, policies and help pages that exist. What we know and already are doing on the different projects should in my opinion be compiled in a clear and concise manner. This would help other language versions to short track their work instead of starting over from scratch. The report about German Wikipedia does mentions the “spoken Wikipedia” WikiProjects but the report does not attempt to outline and systematize the work being done there. My hope is that it would also be possible to incorporate knowledge from the Simple English version and their work (I am aware that there will be no new Simple versions of other languages, but I am sure that many insights can still be gained). This is a real problem as the improvements that already exist are not being implemented by the Community. I believe that this is to a large extent because of lack of knowledge about what can be done and how important it is. For example to the best of my knowledge the Swedish language version completely lacks all information about how to increase accessibility, even though it has a rather well functioning Community. Of course this increase of information would not be the sole solution to the problem, but in combination with the outreach activities during Part 2 of the project this report could hopefully help giving the work towards a more accessible Wikimedia a kick-start.
- As a bonus, on top of the actual report there will also be improvements on-wiki as it will be necessary for me to systematically go through all of the wiki-pages and discussions about the work that so far has been done in the WikiProjects during the fact finding phase of my project. While doing that I will of course start discussions about inconsistencies and improvements that should be made, update them with new information and so forth. This was not part of the work that the "Access for All” foundation did.
- Thirdly, my understanding is that the report about German Wikipedia focuses mainly on people that already have access to external tools that assist them by reading out the text loud – however, these kind of tools could also be implemented directly on Wikipedia. This has the benefit that it does not matter if you are using your own computer or have access to such a program. However, the different options have to be investigated to see which of the possible solutions that are most suitable for Wikimedia. My idea is that my report would outline what external resources that are possible to be used and integrated – either by purchasing a ready-made solution from a company, integrate already existing open-source tools or if necessary develop something new.
- Fourthly, in my report I would try to suggest which of the alternative improvements that are most important to focus our limited resources on – i.e. a priority list based on the (rough) amount of people that would/could be affected by a change and how crucial that change would be for them. This would help the volunteer programmers and staff to focus their attention on the most crucial issues first.
- Fifthly, the lessons learned during the outreach activities (Part 2 of the project) would be added as an appendix. And as always, there is little point to just writing a report that is not used. Therefor I hope that not just the first part of the project is supported, but also Part 2 and the specific focus on outreach activities.
- Worth pointing out is that the "Access for All” foundation that wrote the report about the German language version of Wikipedia has offered to support me in this project if it would be endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Stating that "... we would be happy being considered as a reliable and motivated project partner of your project". I hope that this helped answering your questions.
- Sincerely,
Archiving[edit]
As the candidate is no longer available for fellowship, I'm archiving this proposal. Please feel free to reopen and update in a future open call for fellows if there is still interest in participating in the program! Siko Bouterse (WMF) (talk) 05:48, 31 May 2012 (UTC)