Everybody Wagtail
We attended the Wagtail Sprint at Torchbox in Bristol UK. Thomas, Casper, Esper and I worked together with about 20 developers. The goal was to improve accessibility of Wagtail CMS.
We’ve improved the accessibility of Wagtail with the following: - Adjusted color contrast - Rearranged tab ordering - Added skip links - Landmark fixes - Added ARIA labels - Improve focus outline for elements - Added keyboard navigation - Emphasized unpublished pages - Added keyboard controlled item ordering - Make tabs more accessible with ARIA roles - Worked on SVG icons - Refactored page chooser into an accessible React component
Besides accessibility, we’ve worked on other topics as well: - Made custom image model the default - Hide preview button when preview is unavailable - Refined creation of title on image and document uploads - Updated documentation screenshots - Updated translations of Icelandic, Dutch, and French to 100%
My main takeaway from this sprint is that these accessibility improvements are useful for everybody.
Almost everything we did will improve the user experience for all users. Take keyboard navigation. Of course, keyboard navigation is a must for users who are blind, have low vision or suffer from motor impairment. But all users benefit from keyboard navigation. It will speed up the content creation done by anyone. The same is true for color contrast, tab order, focus highlights. Wagtail is getting better for everybody. That is a big win.
Most changes made will be available to you in Wagtail 2.9. Do you want a sneak preview? Each pull request can be explored via Squash. The Squash link is in the comment section of each pull request. The login credentials are admin/changeme.
Thank you Torchbox for hosting the event and everybody who contributed to it. It was classic. See you all next time. 👋
