We would like to request that Web Accessibility be added to the Mailman wishlist.

The Mailman user community includes an increasing number of individuals. Some have disabilities and rely on adaptive technologies. Incorporating accessibility would help increase the availability and accessibility of your software to people of all needs.

It would be great to have Mailman at a minimum meet World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Single A Guidelines[1] and adhere to Section 508[2] of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

There are some simple things that can help. For instance when the end user views templates like the information page and the user specific options page they get form fields that are not accessible. Forms are a problem because the extra accessibility tags are simply not known to many developers. Forms aren't the easiest of things to use for people with disabilities. Navigating around a page with written content is one thing, hopping between form fields and inputting information is another. Because of this, it is a good idea to add a number of elements to the form. Most of culprit HTML in question is in the python code. One of the main things that needs to be done is to associate form labels explicitly with their controls. Markup for labels needs to have the <label> tag and for attribute and the corresponding input needs an id attribute.

Also adding alt attributes to images, using good html heading structure, and validating [3] to W3C standards would aid accessibility.

If we can be of help in this effort please let us know.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Laura Carlson and the ITSS University of Minnesota Duluth Web Team http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/about/teams.html#www

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/ [2] http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/guide/1194.22.htm [3] http://validator.w3.org/

Laura L. Carlson Information Technology Systems and Services University of Minnesota Duluth Duluth, MN 55812-3009 http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/webdesign/