stevealee

OK, yes it is hard to define what would be acceptable level of accessibility in order to get the tag. Ideally *all* would be accessible so the tag is not required, but that is like saying all themes should be usable and depends on users requirements. However there are some basics that should be address and could merit a tag to flag some effort.

>With all due respect, a user can completely wreck even the most accessible theme and produce a site with all kinds of access barriers very easily. The very authoring & design tools that allow non-technical authors to run their own sites can be used to introduce all kinds of issues.

Indeed thsi an issue with any CSM – you want to let users do what they feel like, yet keeps some constraints. You can use wysiwyg tools to help and could add tests but it all gets complex. However IMHO you shouldn’t throw in the towel and go for lowest common denominator in all the default framework code because you can’t control what users will input. Looking at the page mark up, it is of reasonable quality, so that has not been done for basic HTML. Why should the a11y of the default framework be different?

A a11y group is good suggestion – but i feel we need both actions so the core gradually improves. As you say someone needs to own a drive it so it’s stays on the agenda.

@esmi, @sprungmarker thanks for responding. One of real the issues I found when trying to find a theme suitable for a small business and that had good accessibility was that I just couldn’t find one. Perhaps I wasn’t looking in the right places but it’s not even a tag you can search on in the master themes list. I tried a few (like the old Beast theme) but my firsts test is simple keyboard only access. Accessible 1.0 was the only one I manage to find.

So all the points I made in the first post stand for me.

It’s great to have folks like you both working on the a11y issues, but it seems that, as always we, need to get above the noise and raise awareness. Devs are often only to happy to include a11y when they realise it means more happy users.

So how do we push harder?

I posted here as it seemed the right place, should I also email the dev list? Or will be get an OT response?