This article is written by Mike Gifford, Senior Strategist, CivicActions.

  • The problem: Digital accessibility in government services is difficult.
  • Why it matters: Digital content isn’t accessible for all users and reports of accessibility errors are often never addressed.
  • The solution: Using open source technologies to develop fast and affordable government-wide accessibility solutions.

Open source software (OSS) plays a critical role in building a more inclusive digital world. Disabilities affect 25% of the population, and many of the people who face barriers with digital interfaces have invisible disabilities. There are many ways to define digital accessibility, but it mostly revolves around eliminating barriers that prevent people from perceiving, operating and understanding digital content. People are using digital tools in a great diversity of ways, and so solutions need to be more robust to account for that.

An open issue queue

Most OSS projects have an open issue queue, which is a big advantage for accessibility. Not only can users and developers submit bugs and feature requests, they can also report accessibility problems. One of the big challenges with digital accessibility is finding out if the problem is tied to your instance or configuration, or if someone else has run into the same problem. An open issue queue allows users and developers to share their experiences with the barriers for users.

These issue queues usually support merit-based arguments. Issues related to accessibility are often tagged so that they are easy to find. Maintainers want to make their project as successful as possible. Not all open source projects have a welcoming community, but most successful ones have a core team of people who are interested in encouraging others to become involved so that they can grow the community. Many successful OSS projects understand that it takes a village to build and maintain software. This is reflected in Drupal's mantra, “come for the code, stay for the community.”

Experience with communities

It has become popular in many OSS communities to include a code of conduct to help ensure that conflicts are minimised and resolved. It is understood that most OSS communities would be stronger if they better reflected the communities they were attempting to serve. Having a formal mechanism to help support diversity and inclusion is important for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Accessibility (DEIA). This is important for both in-person events and also the online community.

Some projects have taken an extra step. ReactJS, EmberJS and Drupal have signed up for the GAAD Pledge. This is an annual award by the GAAD Foundation to support open source projects that are working to embed accessibility. These projects drive millions of digital interfaces, and by making them more accessible by default, everyone benefits.

Need and opportunity

Many People with Disabilities (PwD) struggle to find meaningful employment. Although many people with disabilities have university degrees, many are unemployed as there are many barriers to entering the workforce. The move to digital-first distributed teams has the potential to break down those in-person barriers, but when the technology is not accessible, many PwD cannot effectively participate.

A lot can be done with a few free automated tools and basic training in manual testing. It is important to recognise, however, that people with lived experience of disability have a great deal of valuable contributions for the open source community. People who use assistive technology on a daily basis will almost always have a better understanding of what they need than most people addressing Quality Assurance (QA) issues.

There is a drive for talent in developing new and evolving digital interfaces. One underrepresented population is PwD. Since the pandemic, knowledge workers have been allowed to work remotely. Working from home has benefitted many PwD who have challenges with the commute or finding the accommodation they need in an office environment. The open source community provides a global network of people who are looking for people to be involved professionally in implementing and extending the code. PwD can be engaged in a much wider range of tasks than simply testing for accessibility.

Innovation and coopetition

Another advantage for open source and accessibility is coopetition, where competing products, like Drupal and WordPress, share best practices and learn from each other. This doesn’t happen in all areas, but does commonly happen with security, accessibility and performance, which can never get enough attention. Having a common licence allows for code to be easily picked up and shared between projects. This is reflected in initiatives such as Funka's We4Authors Cluster and Drupal's ‘Proudly Found Elsewhere’.

Open source allows for innovation by allowing developers to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Accessibility is also an engine for innovation within open source projects. Building tools that are semantic and work well with PwD means that it is also better for text-to-speech and speech-to-text interfaces. The structured formats that are required for accessibility also allow it to be much more easily manipulated by other machines.

Examples

Innovation happens on a number of levels with open source. As an example, Deque's Axe has really shown how it can accelerate innovation. This accessibility agency built an open source accessibility evaluation engine which has skyrocketed in popularity. Axe is now incorporated in Google’s Lighthouse, Microsoft's Accessibility Insights, Pa11y, as well as a wide assortment of CI/CD tools. Very soon, Drupal will be incorporating axe testing into our development pipeline to catch accessibility issues even earlier in the development process.

CivicActions is now engaged in supporting the development of fast and affordable open source government-wide accessibility monitoring. With modern open source accessibility evaluation engines, we can now quickly scan government sites for barriers. We can then build profiles of what tools and patterns are causing the most problems for users. Having more timely and public information can help governments decide to take accessibility more seriously.

For too many decades, governments have been playing accessibility whack-a-mole. Building long reports of errors that are often never addressed. We need solutions that incentivise government departments to demonstrate ongoing progress.

Open source software and accessibility go hand in hand in building a more inclusive world. Open source allows for innovation by allowing developers to stand on the shoulders of giants. It allows PwD an opportunity to become involved and provide expertise in building new inclusive tools. It also allows for everyone to learn from each other so that projects do not need to waste time testing if design patterns are accessible or not.

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