Accessibility and UX in HAX

What is the accessibility experience like in HAX?
(Am curious given how badly the recent UX audit of Gutenberg was.)

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You can check out it’s current state at https://haxtheweb.org and we’re always improving UX / AX and accessibility. As a baseline though I think we’ll have a higher level of accessibility as well as less accessibility issues down the road for a few reasons.

  1. We’re building on web components and our base components we build on top of are highly accessible in their own right.
  2. The project is based out of a university that has multiple units dedicated to accessibility with a member of our core team (Nikki) that’s been speaking about accessibility in higher education for much of the last decade. We collaborate with those other groups and check in on the best ways to produce our element set, HAX being just a sub-set of the 433 elements we’ve produced to date.
  3. The methodology by which NEW elements are integrated into our “block system” will guarantee they are at a higher level of accessibility than contrib Gblocks. We have a schema (https://haxtheweb.org/hax-schema) which is used to generate the input forms on the fly. This means that we can abstract and improve the accessibility of the input / form experience and not leave that up to the plugin contributor. The HAX element contributor focuses on making a great element, uses the HTML standard like an API, and then has a great new element. While accessibility issue could pop up in their element its reducing the areas for this to be a problem.

Our editing experience is still being cleaned up as are the integrations but we’re highly receptive to feedback in improving both. Accessibility in HAX and all surrounding elements in our ecosystem isn’t a nice to have, it’s a must have for ethical (and legal) reasons. Look for an article to be published in the next month or so about our video player (which is HAX capable / right on the home page) and its accessibility work.

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I really love the idea overall, but think the implementation for WP/CP ecosystem would need to be a bit more streamlined to make it easier and not lose users to impatience… I tried to get the editor to work with the WP plugin but have had some bad luck with that so submitted some GitHub issues instead.

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agreed. Thank you for filing those issues. WP is one of many platforms we’re trying to support on a small team so dx / ux reports are invaluable. We’re working to include builds automatically / document ways to get things going quickly. HAXcms bakes in a working build so it’s mostly just ensuring we reference things correctly.

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I love the way you’re going about this. And I know you’re serious about accessibility because I use this page on your website at Penn State as a valuable resource. Thanks!

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Thank you Tim that means a lot. It’s a labor of love trying to solve this problem space in a cross platform manner that works for as many people as possible.

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