Acs mark

Re: MediaWiki and accessibility

Hi Mark,

MediaWiki (don't confuse it with the company Wikimedia!) is on the whole very accessible for screen reader users, as long as the pages are laid out sensibly (i.e. with headings separating each section). The biggest problem I can think of is the position of the section edit buttons; since they're placed before the section title in the HTML, a screen reader will read a section as "edit <sectionname>". I have a script in my monobook.js file, which moves them to a better location for screen readers, which you can copy to your Monobook.js file for all users. If you need to turn CAPTCHAs on for account creation, make sure they're accessible to all users. Reading diffs can be tricky for screen reader users; I've found that the best way for me to read a complex diff is to go into the HTML source code and search for class names like "diffchange". Apart from that, I can't think of anything else. I've been using Wikipedia for quite a while now so it's second-nature to me, so I could have missed some things. Also, I only have experience with using JAWS for Windows with MediaWiki, so I'm not sure how well other screen readers would handle it.

BTW, you can sign your name on Wikipedia (and all sites running MediaWiki) using four tildes like this: "~~~~". Graham87 12:29, 29 April 2009 (UTC)