When will X/Pro frontend be more WCAG 2.1 (ADA) compliant?

[brightboysquad]

I’m a long time user of X-Theme and Pro. We develop custom sites and X/Pro for clients and love working with X/Pro. While I love X/Pro, we are VERY WORRIED because I can not seem to find any information or vision, direction or even a roadmap regarding X/Pro and following W3C accessibility guidelines as documented in WCAG 2.1.

We wish to keep building X/Pro sites in 2020. When will you add WCAG 2.1 topics to your online Docs? Currently the word ‘WCAG’ provides 0 results in the official docs: https://theme.co/docs

I understand a lot of the work for WCAG 2.1 compliance needs to be done manually. That is okay. However, can you please inform me what X/Pro is working on in order to comply with WCAG 2.1 rules by W3C? (I’m not talking about using X/Pro or Cornerstone. I’m specifically talking about the website users see.

[christian]

Hey @brightboysquad,

This is one of the questions that is best answered either by our leadership or development team. I’ll forward this to one of our leaders.

Just to let you know now though, our development team can fix reported WCAG compliance issues like in this thread if it will not have conflict with our themes so if you encounter an issue, feel free to post here and we’ll submit it in our issue tracker so it will be queued for fixing.

Thanks.

[matt]

Hi @brightboysquad,

As you alluded to, WCAG compliance relates to the end product, ie. the published site, which is obviously undertaken by you as the builder. The theme itself is a tool that enables you to build the site, so at this point, I’m a little unsure where exactly your concerns lie.

I’d love to try and understand your concerns though, so perhaps you could direct me as to how you feel the theme is inherently resulting in a lack of compliance in sites built with it? If there’s something within our products that is preventing you from being compliant, it’s something we can look at internally. Similarly, what would you like to see in our Docs regarding WCAG compliance?

Thanks for bringing your concerns to us.
Matt

[brightboysquad]

Hello guys, thanks for the reply. I totally understand it’s up to the developer to get everything in order. WCAG (or ADA) has a good set of rules, font sizes, contrast and more. It’s also about ARIA landmark roles and attributes, keyboard accessible navigation (applied also on mobile navigation) and more.

I can take care of the colors, font sizes, design. But it would be nice if X/Pro has documentation on how best to take care of the stuff mentioned above. Right now there is no documentation what so ever.

[christian]

Hey @brightboysquad,

Like documenting all the classes and functions available in our products, I believe it is also not feasible to document every ARIA related code we have. But, what we’re saying is, like any other deficiency, you can report ARIA issues to us and our development team will see what they can do. Also, if you have expectations as to how exactly we should do the documentation or as Matt said, “what you’d like to see” regarding ARIA roles, feel free to tell us your ideas.

If you don’t have an idea, the thread I’ve previously linked to is an example. A user reported that he didn’t pass the ADA Compliance. We submitted the case to our issue tracker so it will be queued for investigation and ultimately, our development team released a fix. Do you want a section in our Knowledge Base that lists all WCAG/ARIA fixes? If yes, please just note that this will be subject to a feasibility study.

Thanks.