Launching Accessibility on Wunderpedia!

Ou mai GAAD! It’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day, and at Wunder we honor this the best way we know how: by launching Wunderpedia, a new knowledge bank in wunder.io. We talked about it on Linkedin and Facebook.

Specifically, we are launching the Accessibility section of Wunderpedia (also available in Finnish!). It contains knowledge that benefits anyone and everyone involved in digital accessibility and the creation of accessible web services.

A resource for everyone

Whether you’re a developer, designer, project manager, marketing specialist, curious mind, or client looking for someone to improve the accessibility of your digital service (or create a new one from scratch!), we want you to come learn with us; as a result, we took great care in explaining complicated things in simple ways. We also thought of the people who want to go above and beyond, so every page has a curated list of resources from all over the internet to help you dive even deeper.

At Accessibility on Wunderpedia you can learn about:

• Accessibility terminology (general, technical, and legal).
• Digital accessibility legislation in the EU.
• Assistive technologies used by people with disabilities when interacting with digital services.
• Making accessible user interfaces.
• Making accessible documents.
• Testing the accessibility of services and content.

What makes it special

The EU Web Accessibility Directive and all associated legislation at both the European and country-specific levels have lead to a recent boom in the digital accessibility industry throughout the continent. As a result, one can find many guides all over the internet. So what makes ours different?

• Most other guides provide only general overviews, which are limited and sometimes even misleading. For example, it’s often said that, as a result of the above-mentioned EU directive, all public sector digital services have to comply with WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards. But, if you actually go and read the directive, these standards are nowhere to be found. So what gives? The truth is that there are other legal texts that you must read and understand together in order to figure out that those are the specific standards to follow. We cover this in our European legislation page.
• There’s not much info about country-specific legislation in English; Wunder operates in Finland, Estonia, and Latvia, so we made sure to include pages about their relevant legislation.
• Most other guides covering the details are way too complicated, which makes it hard for non-specialists to understand. We explained things in simple terms, gave our site a clear structure, and used plenty of links (both internal and external) so you can find out more at your own pace.
• Many other guides are PDFs. Even when a PDF is made according to best accessibility practices, it still limits the ways in which users with disabilities can interact with it. We used our website instead; a well-implemented website makes it easy for people to do simple things (like zoom in to enlarge the text), or slightly more complicated stuff (like using a browser extension to change the color scheme into something they can see better).
• We made a living resource: this is not a set-it-and-forget-it type of site. We already have a list of stuff we didn’t have time to include before this initial launch. As we learn more and/or technologies change, we will revise existing content if necessary. We’ll also be adding new accessibility-enhancing features to the Wunder website (such as a breadcrumb navigation, which Wunderpedia made necessary due to having more deeply-nested pages). And so on! We’re open to your feedback and ideas, so just hit us up on social media.

How it came to be

Let me tell you a story about knowledge, passion, collaboration, and love.

When I joined Wunder at the end of November 2019, our main accessibility guy Otso Lahti already had some work lined up for me. One of the first things was to start a certain resource for our developers and designers. I can’t tell you exactly what this looks like, because we’re not ready to share it publicly yet 😉

But I figured something out very early on. I can’t tell a developer about good keyboard focus practices if they don’t understand why keyboard focus is so important for users of certain assistive technologies. I can’t tell a designer about color contrast guidelines if they don’t understand what the WCAG say about this matter. And so on.

So I started to add some background information to this non-yet-public resource. And pretty soon I realized that knowing the basics of stuff like WCAG, ARIA, assistive technologies, and digital accessibility legislation would be beneficial for anyone at Wunder, because we all do stuff related digital accessibility in some capacity at some point.

So we had a conversation with the Accessibility Team (which includes, besides Otso and I, Kati Utriainen, Hanna Kulmala, and Martti Roitto), and we decided to move the more general accessibility knowledge into a separate resource, which was initially a private Google site (which we called “the Wunder Accessibility site”).

Slowly, we added to it (most of the initial writing was done by Kati and I). The site grew and grew, and at the end of February we presented it to the rest of the company (along with some other accessibility resources we had been working on). We also initiated a feedback process on all the resources so we could find out how to improve them.

The Accessibility Team always thought of the “Wunder Accessibility site” as something we would eventually make public for the world to see. Well, Marketing loved it so much that they said “hey, let’s make make that happen as soon as possible!”.

After some meetings about content strategy and scope, we decided that the public iteration of the site would have some changes in structure, and it would not only retain all the original information (after some thorough editing by Kati and I), but actually needed some additions too. Marketing also decided that it was time for Wunder to share more expert knowledge, so all this accessibility stuff would go inside our brand new Wunderpedia! (p.s. as of writing this text, Wunderpedia only contains accessibility stuff, but it will soon have new sections about other topics).

I said earlier that this was a collaborative effort, and it’s true. In order to make this resource public, many more Wunderers had to get involved: Heidi Linkka did a fantastic job as a project manager wearing many additional hats, Markko Tuliniemi gave advice on SEO, Zane Abelite-Medne and Venla Kiminki did most of the grunt work moving the content to the Wunder CMS, Martina Slotte translated a lot of the content into Finnish, Akira Ahola did polishing and other final details before launch, and Otso Lahti and Hanna Kulmala were on-call for opinion and advice.

I am extremely proud of the fruits of our collective labor. And I’m even happier to work at a place where my brain’s tendency to provide excessive amounts of background information could be harnessed into a resource that can hopefully help make the internet a more accessible place.

(I jokingly blame said tendency on “my Too Much Context gene”, and I can’t escape it. I mean, I sat down 2.5 hours ago to write a brief LinkedIn post, and ended up pouring 1200+ words int this Medium article instead 🤷‍♂️).

So what do you think about Accessibility on Wunderpedia? Let me know!