2 Skills-Based Volunteering case studies
How GitHub friends helped the P4 team with accessibility and technical documentation projects
Written by Cynthia Lo, Program Manager, Skills-Based Volunteering, GitHub Social Impact (full post available at GitHub Social Impact)
Project 1: Improving accessibility
In early 2021, Greenpeace International reached out to GitHub’s Skills-Based Volunteering program for help with improving Planet 4’s accessibility. Prior to the outreach, Greenpeace International performed an audit based on the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Accessibility Guidelines to identify what improvements can be made to the platform to improve user accessibility.
With the help of GitHub’s skills-based volunteer, Andrew Eisenberg, led the Greenpeace International team into a deep dive into the GitHub Issues from the P4 repository to denote opportunities for improved inclusivity.
For this project, the Greenpeace International P4 team had analyzed the current output and concluded that the middle-dot characters and number sign of the hashtags are not read aloud for screen readers. Then the GitHub team, led by Andrew Eisenberg, focused on teasers, or blocks of text that preview a blog or article on the site, and screen reader text. Andrew made sure for the rest of the content,date, author, and other metadata read as a single piece of text, and with no special characters read aloud. By fixing the text-to-speech errors, the team significantly improved comprehension for screen readers.
Project 2: Documentation and technical writing
Following the accessibility project, Greenpeace International furthered the partnership with a documentation and technical writing project on the Planet 4 platform. The goal of this project was to improve the quality, findability, and usefulness of the support materials to better assist the users, especially those who are less technical or have less capacity to.
Together with two GitHub volunteers, Inayaili León and Sarah Seacrest, and the Greenpeace International P4 team:
- Audited the existing documentation and support materials including: case studies, best practices, handbook website, Gitbook, Medium blog, YouTube channel, and more
- Reviewed feedback from the community
- Created a plan to reorganize content, including selection of platforms and information architecture
- Over the course of six months, the GitHub project team led a number of discovery sessions to create two reports on Content Style Guide and the Content Template Outlines for Planet4’s team to action on.
Check the full story on the Planet 4 Handbook reorganisation.
Learnings
Initially, each of the projects had challenges with setting up the environments, subsequently delaying the timeline and precluding GitHub employees to jump on board due to the hurdles with setting up their local machine. While this was a minor setback, it was a positive learning to explore leveraging a development environment hosted in the cloud, like GitHub Codespaces, could have aided in this instance. In tandem, we learned that developing documentation internally for how volunteers can get involved would be helpful to provide context and time-scoping for volunteers. This would be useful both internally for the program, as well as for any open source contributor.
As these two projects were a part of the initial pilot launch of Skills-Based Volunteering, we are grateful for the support and understanding of the Planet 4 team to collaborate with us on building out best practices for this program.
We look forward to working with Greenpeace International again in the near future!
