Improve Workflow for testing Theme for Accessibility-Ready-Tag

[Travel_girl]

I have started to test some Themes for the accessibility-ready-tag. While doing that, I have noticed, there is not a real workflow in place to help contributor to test.

There is a documentation for what in general should be tested, but for contributors who are new in accessibility it can be hard to test this way. Cause they are some testing steps that needs to be tested once (like code, skip link or forms) but than, there are points who needs to be tested on every template page (like landmarks, heading structure and so on). Currently the handbook are not really clear about it. In this way, the testing results can't be consistent.

So my idea is, to create a checklist, with explanations what should be tested and where this should be tested.

On top of that, I can create tutorial videos in ​https://learn.wordpress.org and include that also.

I have made a first draft of this checklist, that can be seen under: ​https://wp-coworking.de/draft-cheat-sheet-testing-for-accessibility-ready-tag/

• What do you think of this idea?
• Would this be helpful for contributors?
• What do you think of structure / content from the Checklist itself?
• where it would be a good place to integrate that cheat sheet?

I would like to create this cheat sheet, but I want to be as transparent as possible and include opinions, experiences and whishes from the a11y team and the theme testing team.
Also it would be great, if someone could proof read this.

Every feedback is welcome.
Thanks

[poena]

From experience, people do not use the review checklists. This has been tested in the past and neither new reviewers nor the theme developers themselves made the effort to actually do the step before marking the step as completed.
It may sound harsh but most people just checked every single box without reading and possibly without fully understanding the purpose.

Adding which pages to test is a good idea. This type of documentation issue, that does not involve code changes to the theme directory or the handbooks, could instead be opened in the documentation issue tracker ​https://github.com/WordPress/Documentation-Issue-Tracker, labeled themes.

[Travel_girl]

From experience, people do not use the review checklists. This has been tested in the past and neither new reviewers nor the theme developers themselves made the effort to actually do the step before marking the step as completed.
It may sound harsh but most people just checked every single box without reading and possibly without fully understanding the purpose.

@poena
Oh, thats interesting. That is surprising to me. I have start testing with the current Docs, and even I do A11y Testing as my job I was struggling to test the specific things for themes with the current documentation. Thats why I think it needs improvement and more clarity and what to actually test.

But yes, it should be actually tested and not checking a checkbox.

Maybe more text and description and less like a cheat sheet?

[poena]

I encourage you to open an issue on the documentation issue tracker and continue discussing there.
It is not clear to me if you are proposing improvements to the theme requirements pages, the theme developer handbook, the themes team onboarding, or to ​https://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/handbook/test-for-web-accessibility/

[slferguson]

Working on some user flows at Wordcamp Canada 2024 today related ticket #7714 regarding adding an accessibility information section on theme single pages.

These flows show the high level flow for requesting an accessibility review and being granted (or refused) an accessibility tag.

I'm uploading our flows to this ticket to demonstrate where we see a review occurring and the results of that review in terms of displaying an accessibility tag pass/fail status.

Ticket 7714 - https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7714#ticket

@alh0319

[slferguson]

Whoop uploaded one of them twice :(