444361 - Add basic accessibility compliance checks to automated or manual review process

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Admin/Editor Tools, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

There are very common mistakes many extension authors make that cause extensions to be less accessible than the browser itself, or even totally inaccessible. Some common themes are:

1. Only providing an icon to click on to have access to extension functions. In addition, a menu item must be present to get keyboard accessibility.
2. In extension's windows or dialogs, not properly labeling textboxes, menulists or other such controls. See http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Accessible_XUL_Authoring_Guidelines for more details.
3. Many in-page elements don't have proper markup, making them inaccessible.

See my blog post at http://www.marcozehe.de/2008/07/01/extension-developers-10-things-to-make-your-extension-more-accessible/ for the five most common errors extension devs make and how to fix them.

Mark Finkle has a few tests for accessibility features inside XUL Explorer, which we may be able to leverage. Ideally, when the author uploads an extension, amo would check it and notify the author that there are accessibility issues with the extension that was just uploaded, and what they are.

In addition, a flag should indicate to reviewers/editors that there have been accessibility issues detected with a particular version of the extension.

Comment 1

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

I have a basic XUL validator here too:
http://starkravingfinkle.org/projects/xulcheck/xulcheck.html

It is based on the same "engine" that XUL Explorer uses

Comment 2

[Aaron Leventhal]

What should we do about add-ons that are inaccessible and won't change, but could be made accessible? Marco even has a list of the most common problems.

I'm not talking about something that fundamentally would be extremely difficult to make work with a screen reader, like a free form drawing package.

But, most extensions can be made accessible, with very little work? 

Not to be too Draconian, but I'm not sure they should even be allowed on amo.

Comment 3

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

We've got an automated add-on validator now.  If someone can come up with a way to automate this, I can integrate it.  We've got jshydra available to us - perhaps that could help?

Comment 4

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

Resolving as incomplete.  Offer is still open if someone can come up with a set of rules in code.  New code that does validation is at http://github.com/mattbasta/amo-validator