An update on the outcome of the Hackfest accessibility discussion.

We got one substantive fix which I think will be a significant improvement: when text is converted to path, the text content is now saved as an ARIA label so it can be read by assistive technologies.  

I spent a lot of time poking around the idea of adding better language support, which is an accessibility issue both for disabilities and in the more general sense of creating graphics that are accessible to as many people as possible.

I've summed up some of the discussion and my thoughts in two wiki pages: [http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Accessible_graphics Accessible Graphics] and [http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Language_support Language Support].  

See also 

* [https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/170340 Bug #170340, "metadata: need User Interface for SVG accessibility features"] 
* [https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1249423 Bug #1249423 "Properly support the <switch> element and the "systemLanguage" attribute"].  

Both of these bug reports existed, but I've added a new comment to each with an update and further references.  I'm not really in a position to make these changes happen (I don't have the experience with the Inkscape codebase), but if anyone is interested in following up on these ideas I'd be happy to review, test, and brainstorm ideas.

AmeliaBR

On 26 April 2015 at 19:26, Amelia Bellamy-Royds <amelia.bellamy.royds@...1063....> wrote:
Hello all,

I've arranged to hold a discussion with the Inkscape Hackfest team in Toronto this week about accessibility issues and SVG in general or Inkscape in particular.

There are really two sides of accessibility when it comes to software like Inkscape:

- making the software itself more accessible (e.g., can it be easier to navigate, or to change the UI styling to create high contrast or larger fonts/icons)

- making it easier for Inkscape users to make accessible SVG (e.g., encouraging the inclusion of alt text, language attributes, ARIA attributes for interactive components, logical groupings/ordering of all objects and text) 

I was going to add some more notes to the agenda page for the Hackfest, but discovered the wiki is locked down against spammers.

So, a quick request to those who hold the keys to the wiki to send me a log-in invite.

For anyone else, if you have any thoughts on what is or isn't good or bad about accessibility issues and Inkscape, consider this a brainstorm email thread.  I'll then try to compile the ideas from here and from the in-person discussion into a focused wiki page.  Hopefully we can come up with a list of To-Dos, at least some of which might be classified as low-hanging fruit that can easily be picked.

Best,
Amelia Bellamy-Royds