09.30.20 Meeting Minutes

Attendees

Martha (@marthacryan ) Max (@telamonian ) Karla (@karlaspuldaro) Alek tony (@tonyfast) Alex (@ajbozarth) Isabela (@isabela-pf)

Notes

Say hello!

Introduce yourself however you like. What do you want to get from this meeting?

• Our group has limited experience with accessibility work previously. We are all learning. Hooray!

• No one here uses a screen reader or other assistive software.

• Should we do outreach to have people involved who use this? Probably. Find a way how.

Why this meeting? Why now?

• Multiple JupyterLab team meetings where we discuss people’s interest in making JupyterLab accessible, but those interested don’t know where to start (both in learning about accessibility and wrangling JupyterLab).

• Let’s be resources for each other! Share skills, knowledge, and morale.

• 3.0 release plans to have a lot of added features, 4.0 might be a good time to push for improving what is already there.

  • yes definitely, no way is this getting in 3.0

What goals do we have?

• WCAG specifications. Let’s review them and figure out how to implement them. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Content_Accessibility_Guidelines - We reviewed this document to start getting on the same page.

• Get different people involved. Get people who actually use accessibility features/ screen readers/ assistive software. - Avoid single point of failure problems. Community engagement needs to be done together.

• Are consoles a good place to start? Some older consoles are established and already have accessible affordances for us to start working with.

• • Another resource exploring what a typically inacessible experience (web comics) can be like with affordances.https://comica11y.humaan.com/ (comics use cells too… :eyes:)

• https://design.chicago.gov/accessibility/tools/

• Need a plan to reviewing/getting feedback on JupyterLab as is and the changes we make. Can’t just rely on accessing disability communities because it’s our responsibility to fix it.

What are people working on?

• Max

  • accesible slider Widget

    • PR: https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/pull/9104

    • probably a one-off, not really reusable in current form

  • LabButton

    • fully accesible replacement for current blueprint-based Button in @jupyterlab/ui-components

    • working on PR, hopefully have an initial stab done by the meeting

    • based on

      • https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/Roles/button_role

      • https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices-1.1/examples/button/button.html

      • https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/button#Accessibility_concerns

    • tricky part: the button text

      • the reccommendation: always use an HTML button element, always label like text

      • for icon buttons (eg all of our toolbar buttons), the suggestion is to hide the text using CSS

      • example CSS

        .hide {
          position: absolute !important;
          top: -9999px !important;
          left: -9999px !important;
        }
        

        or

        .visuallyhidden {
          position: absolute;
          overflow: hidden;
          clip: rect(0 0 0 0);
          height: 1px;
          width: 1px;
          margin: -1px;
          padding: 0;
          border: 0;
        }
        

      • seems convoluted, can we just use aria-label (this is exactly what it’s for)? Opinions seem mixed

  • I need resources to finish hashing out the styling system for the LabFoo components

  • bigger picture: as concrete problems arise (like the text vs aria-label thing for LabButton), we should use them as a jumping off point to seek outside expert opinion/help

• Isabela (and tony, Gonzalo, Eric)

  • Color contrast https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/issues/8832

Next steps

• Do we want to share these notes somewhere (team-compass)?

• Martha and Max working on UI components (LabButton?)

  • Alek might help too!

• Spend an hour introducing everyone to JupyterLab UI so we understand what we are working with and start identifying places to work with it. (Do this later when people have done some exploration first)

• Removing UI components based on blueprint

• Reach out to Chris Holgraf, Tania Allard, and Jason Grout about contacts we’ve made in this area already (tony)

• Find and share resources (everyone)

• Settings UI (Alex). Will start after JupyterCon. Needs accessibility reveiw for the design.

• Meet every other week (twice a month).