Multiple fires in an alternating pattern

JupyterLab Accessibility Journey Part 2

I want to be honest with you, I started asking accessibility questions in JupyterLab spaces while filled with anxiety. Anxiety that I was shouting into the void and no one else would work on accessibility with me. Anxiety that I didn’t have the skills or energy or knowledge to back up what I wanted to do. Anxiety that I was going to do it wrong and make JupyterLab even more inaccessible. Sometimes I still feel that way.

Here’s the thing. That anxiety, while real and worth acknowledging, doesn’t help the disabled people we constantly fail and exclude when we keep building things inaccessibly. So yes, I want you to know I felt that way and that you might too, but I also want you to remember who we are here for, especially if you are working to support a group you aren’t a part of (as is the case with me). Plus, many of these concerns didn’t end up happening. First, I didn’t end up being alone at all! Each of the people that have joined in have different skills that have helped us tackle issues that I don’t think any of us would’ve been able to on our own. Knowing we are working together also helps keep me accountable because I’d like to be able to show up to our meetings with something to share. As for worrying that I’m doing it all wrong, I suppose that’s still a possibility. Speaking for myself, I’d rather be making mistakes, learning, and iterating than continue to let JupyterLab stay inaccessible indefinitely.

In a space where considering the needs of disabled people isn’t the standard, accessibility might feel like an insurmountable challenge. For example, when I showed up to our first devoted accessibility meeting, JupyterLab’s accessibility status was like a hazy shape in the distance. I was pretty sure it wasn’t good, but I didn’t know for sure how or why. A few meetings later and a closer look made me realize that haze was actually smoke and I'd walked myself and others directly into a (metaphorical) burning building. But just because it felt like everything was chaos without a good place to start didn't mean that was the truth. In fact, it wasn't. Building software is more about people more than any tool, so let’s consider what our regular team of people on the user-contributor-maintainer spectrum said are the basics of what they care about in JupyterLab.

Users want to:

Use JupyterLab to read or navigate documents.
Use JupyterLab to edit and run documents. To edit a document, users need to be able to navigate where they want to edit, so the read-only experience is a prerequisite.
Know what things they can do in JupyterLab and get help on how to do it.

Contributors want to:

Gain enough understanding of a JupyterLab in order to work with it.
Understand the expectations of their contributions and how to meet them. In this case, they would want to know that they need to think about accessibility and how to consider that.

Maintainers want to:

Ensure that JupyterLab is both progressing and relatively stable.
Promote sustainable growth for a project that doesn’t overwrite past efforts. Automation can be helpful because maintainers are usually strapped for time.

With the support of a team member with prior experience auditing for accessibility, we pinpointed specific ways in which JupyterLab lacked support for accessibility broken up by WCAG 2.1 standards.

From conversations with these more experienced community members, we found that issues generally broke up into four categories of work needed (not necessarily in this order):

1. Make JupyterLab accessible for a read-only type experience

This is something users need. For our purposes, we’re using read-only to describe what you need to navigate and consume all the content in JupyterLab from the interface to the documents and processes that live in it. Most of this also falls under WCAG standards, and are the first things users need to start working with JupyterLab since it’s difficult to interact with a space if you can’t get where you want to go.

2. Make JupyterLab accessible for an interacting/editing experience

This is something users need and is the other half of WCAG standards. Once you can navigate the space, people need to interact by writing, editing, running process, and so on. While WCAG standards do cover interactive web experiences and they are written generally enough to apply to many interface types, their roots in a more standard website experience means that we also have some grey areas to account for since JupyterLab can easily include complex and layered interactions than even other web apps. We are supporting this by looking into how other tools with similar uses (like coding) approach these types of accessibility and hope to test it in the future.

3. Accessibility documentation

This is something users and contributors need and has two parts. One part is making the documentation itself accessible through WCAG compliance in the docs theme, labeling relevant content, and providing content in different forms. Second is adding documentation specifically for accessibility such as how to use accessibility features and how accessibility fits in to our contribution process.

Accessibility and documentation both have reputations for falling to the wayside, and we almost got so caught up in applying WCAG standards to the software itself that we continued the pattern. But making an accessible experience is, like any UX problem, not limited to the time spent within that product. Think of it this way, if there is no accessible documentation on how to get started with JupyterLab and use relevant accessibility support, then all the work we’ve done in the software itself won’t be able to serve the very people it is there for.

4. Adding relevant accessibility tests to the JupyterLab contributing workflow

This is something contributors and maintainers need, though the results also benefit users. As grateful as I am to have a group of people who are taking action to make JupyterLab accessible, it isn’t enough on its own. We aren’t a group that can review every single PR and we may not all be able to devote time to this forever; tests ensure that accessibility remains a priority in the contributing workflow regardless of individual involvement. It also will help prevent current efforts from being overwritten by new contributions.

Automated accessibility testing has its limits because you are trying to quantify an experience without getting users involved, but I think a first pass and a reminder to the community—especially the contributing community—that accessibility is something we are all responsible for is critical. Since accessibility isn’t yet a regular standard for contributions in many projects, feedback from tests might also be an opportunity for people who haven’t worked with accessibility before to start learning more.

Where we are now

As I’m writing this post, our team is mostly focused on JupyterLab accessibility for WCAG compliance starting with the read-only type experience. Among many things, JupyterLab is currently missing of landmarks and labels that block manual accessibility testing to a degree since they prevent further navigation and interaction. Starting here means that we are a step closer to users being able to accessibly read content in the interface.

If you are going to take away one thing from my journey so far, I’d tell you to be consistently brave. Feeling anxious in the face of challenges and accepting areas where you don’t yet have knowledge is normal, but it isn’t reason to back down. Find the people that will collaborate with you and dive in. And when I get lost and don’t know what to do, I find it most helpful to put people first and remember who I am doing this for. Breaking the work into pieces by what users need can help you strategically start putting out fires.

Focusing on people just for strategy isn’t all though. Be on the look out for my next blog where I’ll talk about what the disconnect of what accessibility meant to different people in our community and how that impacted the time and way we’ve solved issues in JupyterLab so far.

This is part of a series of blogs around making JupyterLab more accessible. You can read the whole series here.

Interested in getting involved? Join our community via the JupyterLab accessibility meetings listed every other week on the Jupyter community calendar.