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Building Inclusive Open Source Software

What is it?

It all started with a statement:

Despite being deeply based on values of sharing and empowerment, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects often lack inclusiveness and accessibility.

This project aims at providing accessibility and inclusiveness knowledge for organizations and individuals who build open-source software.

This repository contains short training modules (ranging from 10 to 30 minutes), which can either be dispensed to teams as workshops, or individually read as articles. These modules cover a wide range of subjects, from conceptual and historical background on accessibility and inclusiveness, to concrete design and programming guidelines.

These modules should not be seen as holding the truth regarding the subjects tackled, but rather as a condensed introduction which goal is to help teams get started with accessibility and inclusiveness for their product.

The easiest way to access the content is via the static web site built from this repository.

Where does it come from?

This project started out as we - Page Magnier--Slimani (Jami) and Maxence Vahedi (Olvid) - struggled with the lack of awareness and specific resources on accessible and inclusive applicative development. We therefore began this collaborative project, which goal is to provide accessibility and inclusiveness resources to our teams and to the FOSS community.

Please note that we are not accessibility or inclusiveness experts, but passionate people who did their best to provide relevant content and who will be happy to get any feedback or contribution you may have! The applications we are working on at the time of writing are not perfect by any means from an inclusiveness standpoint. With this project, we only try to provide some answers to the questions we had when beginning our work on accessibility and inclusiveness.

We truly want this project to keep evolving beyond its original scope and our limited expertise!

A navigation schematic. The first section is made to be navigated in a linear way except the platform specific assistive technologies that can be skipped. The second section is linear. The third section expects you to go through the base Inclusive Design module and then to the platform you are working on. You can skip this section if you are not a designer. As for the design section, the design platform has a base module and specific ones for different frameworks. The last conclusion section is linear.
Click the image to view and zoom in full size.

Contributing

If at any point through your reading, you find some mistakes or missing information, please let us know by opening an issue or a pull request. We will be happy to review it and incorporate it to the project. We will also be happy to integrate any new module you would like to write.

To run the project locally:

  • Clone the repository

  • Install mkdocs:

pip install mkdocs-material
  • Run the server
mkdocs serve

If you commit, please use the syntax "[section]-[acronym]: [commit_description]" (example: "A-AIE: first version of module").

If you need any help incorporating your work in ours, please feel free to open an issue or contact us at 'maxence.vahedi@proton.me' or 'pagems@proton.me'.

Using this project's content

This project is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. This means that you are free to share, adapt and use its content (even for commercial use). Please note that when doing so you need to give appropriate credit and to release your version under the same license, indicating if changes were made.

Resources

The editable file of how to navigate this training