Announcing a11y.reviews
Tobie Langel and I have launched a new site called a11y.reviews (spoken as Accessibility Reviews).
Today if you want to identify if a tool, platform, service, resource, etc. is accessible you have to ask the broader community for its feedback. This does not scale.
The goal of the site is to let us, the community, both find and share our accessibility experience with assorted resources. Do you want to do online surveys but don’t know what to use or avoid? Check a11y.reviews. Have you spent time using a commenting platform for your blog and have a good experience with its accessibility? Leave feedback at a11y.reviews.
The site is still very new. It has no logo, no brand, and all sorts of structure questions. There is work to be done, but only by getting feedback and use can we know what needs to change. The styles were ripped from DoesMySiteDeserveRecognition.com because it was fastest. This was an accidental weekend project shoehorned into our real lives and other plans.
The site is hosted at GitHub and anyone can file an issue or make a pull request. It supports Markdown by default. If you do not know Markdown and/or do not have a GitHub account you can contact me directly. I hope to simplify that process.
The structure is intentionally simple. A group of services (such as online surveys, or content platforms) lives in an <h2>, and then below that (<h3>s) is the one being reviewed. Below those are headings (<h4>) for references and a recommendation.
This structure can change. If it proves to be unwieldy then it should change. Your participation helps to do that.
I have added three items to start. They show the structure as well as the type of content. I expect needing to time-stamp each entry will help (freshness dating) as well as crediting those who make submissions will be a good idea.
If you have a good experience with a resource, please share it. This resource does nobody any good if we are also not tracking what the good (accessible) options.
4 Comments
Reply Really nice idea, we need more stuff like this. Hopefully it will get the attention of mentioned platforms. Congrats!
Reply This is great but I’m disappointed to find no sharing buttons.
I’ve no good way to share this with others.
In response to . Reply Patty, I do not use third-party sharing buttons and when I had rolled my own the stats showed me they were not used.
You can share the address of any page by pressing ctrl+L to put your keyboard cursor in the browser address bar, ctrl+A to select the page address, and ctrl+C to copy it. Then go to where you want to share it and press ctrl+V to paste it.
On a Mac, press ⌘+L to put your keyboard cursor in the address bar, use ⌘+A to select the page address, and ⌘+C to copy it. Then go to where you want to share it and press ⌘+V to paste it.
If you want to share this on Twitter, use this link.
Reply This looks very interesting, and I hope it really takes off and is updated often unlike some projects of this scope. Thanks for starting this, and I for one will definitely be back.
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