Last week I wrote an article stating that I was planning on performing a jQuery UI accessibility review. Plans have not changed, and I am still planning on performing this review, with the help of several others who have stepped up and offered to help, next week, starting on November 7. This quick article will outline my plan for organizing and performing the review.

This review is meant primarily to provide broad and rapid feedback to jQuery UI developers about the ways in which components can be improved to remove accessibility barriers. This will not be an incredibly thorough review. It is not necessary to identify WCAG 2.0 success criteria that a component is not meeting.

We will be reviewing the development branch of jQuery UI, as this is where work is most active, and where some accessibility improvements have already been made. We will be looking, in particular, at the jQuery UI 1.9pre (master) demos.

Update: Thanks to Scott González for identifying that we should use the datepicker rewrite from the datepicker branch.

The Plan

There are four categories of components in the demos: interactions, widgets, effects, and utilities. We will start with the widgets and if time permits review the effects, utilities, and interactions. After reviewing a component a short, informal, report will be written by the reviewer. Where necessary these reports will then be filed as bugs against the appropriate component.

Reviewing

1. Select a component (such as Accordion).
2. Post a comment on this article stating the component you have selected, how you are testing (screen-reader, magnifier, keyboard only, etc.), and details about the technology used (JAWS 12 + Firefox 6).
3. Perform an assessment of each of the examples listed on the demo page for the component you selected, noting problems and possible improvements.
4. Post a second comment stating that you have completed the testing, include a list of any examples you did not test, and include your notes.

If you have * any * questions at all you can always contact me or ping me @ezufelt on Twitter.

Reporting

At the end of each day I will take all reviews posted to this issue and will:

1. File any necessary bugs against the tested components.
2. Post a follow-up article with a summary of the day's activities, including links to bugs that have been filed.

Fixing Bugs

If anyone is interested in working on fixing bugs after they are filed, and is interested in feedback on the solution, then please post a comment here. It is most helpful if you can provide a URL to a demo where the bug has been fixed, to make it easier for reviewers to test.

Conclusion

I am hoping that this review is a great success and that we can see real improvements to what is already an excellent product which is used by such a high proportion of sites on the web.

Tags:
Accessibility, Drupal, javascript, jQuery UI, Planet