Accessibility goals + public statement & contact

[dcamron]

We've had some fleeting discussions in the past about accessibility, but we need to capture some concrete goals (some of which may be important to get done before the Hackathon!)

What are the ways we can commit to improving accessibility to our website and build accessible design into our offerings? Suggestions:

• Create an accessibility statement (e.g. UCAR's) describing out commitment
• Include a dedicated communication channel for accessibility concerns and feedback
• Implement theme configs (very useful read!), site maps, and other helpful considerations from other projects in our space
• Automate auditing of the accessibility of our sites and Cookbooks
• From @jukent: proactive language considerations, room for translation work, and non-English annotations to content
• From @jukent: design considerations for screen readers, e.g. descriptive link text and meaningful alt text on images

This may be better represented as a Discourse discussion, but I wanted to capture at least the first two as action items we can cross off in issues to make sure to get done before the Hackathon.

[jukent]

Perhaps you all just got an email through our team alias, I entered our site into Site Improve and we got an accessibility score of 81. It wasn't very informative on what we were marked down for. I might request a full report.

Something that could work for screen reader improvement along with descriptive link text is making sure our images have descriptions.

[jukent]

The UCAR's accessibility statement starts similar to, "Project Pythia takes the accessibility of our educational portal seriously and have implemented the following measures to improve accessibility of our websites:"

So, what measures have we taken?

We're committed to free and open source content, reducing the barrier to entry in the geosciences. We have open monthly community meetings. We partner with outreach efforts such as ScienceMatch to serve broad communities.