Our Outreachy projects in 2023
Wagtail is joining Outreachy’s open source internships program with a focus on accessibility
What is Outreachy
Outreachy provides internships in open source and open science. The program provides internships to people subject to systemic bias and impacted by underrepresentation in the technical industry where they are living. Internships are fully remote, over 3 months, with interns receiving a fair stipend to support their work.
For Wagtail, this type of program is one of the best ways to work with more diverse contributors. We’re elated to have been selected, and hope we’ll get to work with between one and three new contributors this year.
Our project ideas
Like last year, we’ve earmarked three project ideas across a range of types of contributions.
Accessibility features documentation
As part of our ongoing admin accessibility audit, we’ve identified a lot of gaps in our documentation. In particular, we’re missing a lot of information about the accessibility features in the CMS, which is in direct contradiction with our intention to follow the ATAG 2.0 standard, as stated on our Accessibility policy.
The main goal of the project will be to extend our user guide documentation. By the end of the project, we would want all of Wagtail’s accessibility features to be documented – in line with our goal to follow ATAG. We also have a few additional goals in mind:
- Introduce more documentation directly in the CMS.
- Produce videos for documentation purposes.
- Improve our process for keeping documentation up to date.
Do you have questions or suggestions? Please join our Accessibility features documentation discussion.
Adopt generic class based views across the Wagtail admin
A long-standing refactoring, for Wagtail to Adopt generic class based views across all areas of admin. We want to invest more into addressing this type of technical debt / making Wagtail more customizable with Django-friendly APIs.
Do you have questions or suggestions? Please join our Adopt generic class based views across all areas of admin discussion.
Wagtail.org website accessibility
We want to improve our wagtail.org website to become a reference implementation of accessibility best practices in the Wagtail ecosystem. We want to:
- Produce an accessibility audit
- Implement accessibility improvements
Around those two primary goals, there are secondary goals of:
- Exploring accessibility best practices
- Sharing best practices with the community
And there are additional stretch goals to explore, depending on the candidate’s interest and time:
- Auditing other sites – the Wagtail ecosystem has a lot of other sites which would benefit from additional scrutiny.
- Adding automated tests – so rather than one-off checks, a page’s test results could be tracked over time, across the whole site.
Adding features in Wagtail – based on the findings from the audit and the implementation, refining how the CMS works.
Do you have questions or suggestions? Please join our Wagtail.org website accessibility.
We’re really happy to have a line-up with such a good breadth of types of projects, and hope lots of Outreachy applicants will be equally thrilled!