Published: November 28, 2024
My LocalGov Drupal contributions for week-ending November 29nd, 2024
This week I fixed lots and lots of accessibility issues.
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Meetings and Meet-ups
- Tech Group Drop-in: This was the only meeting I got to attend this week, but WHITE SMOKE we got the Single-Directory Components PR merged. Woo Hoo!!!
Code Contributions
- This was another one of those weeks where I did a lot of work on triaging issues, most notably calming people down when getting stressed/excited about our PR to start using Single-Directory Components. It's a big change and very much unfamiliar territory for a lot of people, so we need to take it easy when introducing it.
- Our Primary Banner has a link field, and if you put a link into it will wrap all the content of the banner in an
<a>tag. This is an accessibility issue as reported by Maria, especially if there is a lot of content in the banner - the link text becomes meaningless to people with assistive technologies. I created a PR in LocalGov base to wrap only the banner title in the link, and a corresponding PR in LocalGov Paragraphs to update the help text in the link field to reflect the new change. - I managed to get through every issue in LocalGov Base that was tagged with accessibility and either fix it or move the conversation along so it can get fixed.
- One nice fix for this was an issue opened by Keelan nearly two years ago - sorry I only got around to it now, Keelan - to fix the focus states for service status items.
- When this far, I decided "why not look at every accessibility issue across the whole of LocalGov Drupal?". So I did!
- This led to a nice issue to add the language widget to ckEditor. This then allows editors to select parts of their content that is in a different language to the rest of the page to have the language for that selection set. E.g. if you say "Bon Voyage!" in a blog post, you can mark "Bon Voyage" as being French.
- Next up, I worked on an issue to set Full Page Alert Banner field labels to "Hidden" as those labels were just adding extra noise to people using screenreaders and not conveying extra information.
- We had multiple issues with the title on the Full Page Alert Banner. While working on a PR to fix some of those issues, I also took the time to rewrite the Full Page Alert Banner template and some of the CSS to bring it up to more modern standards.
- We're told that a lot of councils are setting their Guides Navigation to a vertical system instead of the default column system we have. This was marked as an accessibility issue. We now have two PRs to add a "Layout" field so editors can choose on a guide-by-guide basis what layout they want for their guide nav.
- LocalGov Guides PR to add the new field and update the block config.
- LocalGov Base PR to add the necessary CSS