2023-10-18 –, Online talks
Wagtail is one of the most popular content management systems in the Django world, and the Wagtail team is committed to making it as easy as possible to create accessible websites. It still requires intention and effort on the part of a developer creating a Wagtail website, though. Learn the tools and techniques you need to set your editors up for success.
Over the past few years, the Wagtail CMS core team and accessibility subteam have made significant commitments to improving Wagtail's accessibility – both the CMS interface itself as well as the websites that it produces. This talk is focused on the latter, aiming to show how you (a developer of a Wagtail-powered site) can set up your models, templates, and workflows in order to make it as easy as possible for your editors to create websites that are as accessible as possible. I say "as possible" because it's important to recognize that it's virtually impossible for a website to ever be considered 100% accessible, but with some care put into what we do on the development side, we can prevent some of the most widespread accessibility issues that users may come across.
Some of the topics that are planned to be covered include:
- How to configure and use Wagtail's new built-in accessibility checker
- Ensuring alt text is used appropriately (Spoiler alert: every image doesn't need alt text!)
- Usage of aria-label attributes to provide essential context to screen readers
- Custom validation to ensure that a page has a logical heading order
I'm a full-stack web developer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where we use Django to power our main public website, our intranet, and a large number of other internal websites. I'm also a member of the core team for Wagtail, the CMS which powers all of the above JPL sites, and a part of its accessibility subteam, as well.