Hi list,

Gabriel Scherer (2022/01/17 22:06 +0100):
> If you know people who would be willing to work on improving the
> accessibility of Discourse, we should think about funding this work. Please
> get in touch!

On Wed, Jan 19, 2022 at 4:34 PM Sébastien Hinderer <Sebastien.Hinderer@inria.fr> wrote:

If somebody would volunteer, how would that work? You'd need some
guarantees that the contributions you fund get both upstreamed and
deployed, right?

First of all, I cannot make decisions alone, every action/expense of the Foundation has to be approved by the executive committee ( http://ocaml-sf.org/about-us/ ). So what I mention in this thread are just hypotheses based on my preferences.

Now on the idea of "guarantees that contributions get upstreamed": whether a contribution gets upstreamed depends on the work and the communication of the contributor, but also on many factors outside their control. We wouldn't ask a contributor to provide guarantees they can't give, and in particular we would not condition the funding on upstreaming. If we approve an action, and the contributor works to the best of their ability, I believe they should be paid for their time even if it doesn't work out.

I don't have any experience with Discourse contributions, but a key to a successful upstream contribution is always good communication (early and often) with the upstream maintainers. In fact, I guess that the first course of action would be to survey what has already been done accessibility-wise for Discourse (see for example https://meta.discourse.org/t/accessibility-audit-and-shepherd-for-making-improvements/66620/6 , https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-with-a-screen-reader/178105/27) and understand the current status.

After looking a bit more at this: it looks like the Discourse people are taking accessibility seriously, and it's possible that just nobody pointed out the issues with the mailing-list registration to them. Just doing this (studying how accessibility feedback is given, what information maintainers are asking form, and then sending feedback on the mailing-list registration question) could be a good first step before working on contributing the code ourselves. And this good first step is already non-trivial work that one could consider funding.