[ARCHIVED] Organizing the Accessibility Group

[scottdennis]

It occurs to me as I look at this group that it might benefit from more organization in the group forum.  Currently there are 110 topics in the forum that get displayed in no particular order.  Users can search the group to hopefully find the topics they are interested in commenting on.  Another strategy we can employ is using labels and buttons to filter by labels.  In the right side navigation we could add something like:

Clicking on a label button would filter to only topics with that label.

Anyone can add any label they like but this would hopefully encourage people to use labels for common themes.  If we are going to add a labels sidebar, what do you think the top 10 to 15 accessibility related labels should be?

[tft]

Hi @scottdennis ,

There is already a Related Tags (tag cloud) widget in the sidebar.  You could probably use that do guide your choices.  By the way, that widget isn't accessible. It lists all tags alphabetically, and sighted users can see visually which tags are most popular based on their relative font weight.  Those weights aren't communicated at all to non-visual users. Also, the less popular tags are faded out by lightening the font-weight and decreasing the opacity which significantly impedes their readability.

I like your idea of adding labels, in part just because it will provide a more accessible alternative to the Related Tags widget. 

[scottdennis]

Thanks Terrill,

I have been waiting to see in anyone else wants to weigh in as well but I like your idea of using the widget as a starting point.  I wasn't aware of the accessibility concerns that you brought but now that you have mentioned them I can see what you mean.

[christopher_phi]

+1 to @tft on using that list as a starting point, potentially with some standardization. Some ideas are below. If these topics are used across the community then some of these may need to add "Accessibility" at the end, but if not then just "Math" would probably work and accessibility could be dropped: 

• Image Accessibility (Alt Text)
• Assistive Technology
• Blackboard Ally
• Canvas Accessibility Checker
• Document Accessibility
• Math Accessibility
• Rich Content Editor Accessibility
• UDOIT
• Video Captions
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

On a related note - Scott, many of the tags are very similar (e.g. accessibility, accessible) - it is possible to edit/consolidate some of those? 

[scottdennis]

Hi Chris,

Unfortunately I don't think we can edit or merge existing tags.  We can, however, choose which tags we want to highlight by providing filters.

[scottdennis]

I'm thinking most of the tags will be specific to this group.  Do you think for example that using "images" in the accessibility group would be apparent to most people that the tag has to do with accessibility of images?  Same for, say, "math"?

[christopher_phi]

Thanks @scottdennis - if the tags are global then I would definitely use "Image Accessibility" instead of images which could refer to a number of things outside of image accessibility.