Accessibility

One of the things that really matters to us here at Growstuff is accessibility. We want this project to be as open and inclusive to everyone as it can be.

Growstuff policy
It is Growstuff's intention and policy to follow relevant web accessibility guidelines, and to make our website as accessible as possible to the widest audience, including people with disabilities and people using a wide variety of devices to access our site.

Reading/background

 * Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
 * Getting started with web accessibility
 * Guidelines and techniques

Tools

 * Contrast ratio (how readable is that text?)

Developer tools and resources
Accessibility applies not only to members of our website, but also to the people who work on it. We want to make sure that we don't needlessly exclude developers through inaccessible tools/processes/documentation/etc.

Tracker
We use Pivotal Tracker to track stories we're working on. The Pivotal Tracker website has serious accessibility flaws and won't even run in a browser that doesn't have Javascript enabled (and thus is impossible to use with a screenreader or similar). However, there are a number of third-party clients available, including a quite good command line client. Details are given on the Pivotal Tracker page.

Screencasts and videos
Growstuff is a Ruby on Rails project, and the Ruby community seems to love screencasts as a primary form of documentation.

Screencasts and other videos are a problem for accessibility because they are hard for many people to watch, including:


 * people with visual impairments
 * people with hearing loss or other auditory impairments
 * people with attention deficits, concentration problems, memory loss, etc
 * people who speak English less fluently
 * people on slow Internet connections
 * people using small screens such as tablets or phones
 * people who are working in a public place and forgot to bring their headphones
 * people who can only grab short snippets of time and want to skim

... and probably many more

In addition, screencasts aren't searchable and you can't copy and paste from them, making them hard to refer back to and use later on.

Please keep this in mind when recommending online resources. There's nothing wrong with pointing people at screencasts and other videos, but please don't expect everyone to be able to watch them. It's a good idea to have some other resources on hand to recommend as an alternative, such as text documentation or a wiki or some good blog posts. (Many of the technologies we use have recommended resources listed at Learning resources, which also notes which ones are video, text, or other formats.)

In some cases, when a technology is central to our project and there are no good textual docs available, I think it would be worthwhile for us to create the documentation ourselves. This is something we can contribute back to the wider open source community, either by offering it to the projects in question, or by hosting it on our own wiki (where hopefully Google searches will find it, if people are looking).

NOTE: We have recently learned that http://railscasts.com/ has "ASCIICasts" (yeah, they really called them that) of many of their screencasts. So that is one option available in some cases.