26 May 2023

Global Accessibility Awareness Day may have been last week. But we had so much great accessibility information to share, we broke it up into two parts.

Wagtail Accessibility Trends Part 2

One thing we could all be doing better as Wagtail project creators is offering support for Windows high contrast mode, also known as Contrast themes. These themes give users the option to adjust colour palettes that work best for their vision.

According to the chart above, only 8.13% of Wagtail websites make adjustments for users with custom colour palettes and only 1.19% of Wagtail websites offer adjustments for contrast preferences. Depending on the frontend technology you're using, there might already be built-in support for different colour themes. Check the documentation! For example, Bootstrap 5.3 now has official support for different colour modes.

You don't have to worry about the contrast in the Wagtail admin though. We've made a lot of adjustments in newer versions of Wagtail to support high contrast mode and to offer a dark mode option for anyone who prefers it.

Now, although the trends we looked at today and last week may seem disappointing, there is some good news. As you can see in this chart here, the number of Wagtail websites with no accessibility issues detected increased from 3.83% in 2022 to 4.44% in 2023.

That increase may seem tiny, but we view every increase as a win! So don't let the numbers overwhelm you. These are very solvable problems and even small actions matter very much. Here are a few small actions you can take:

• Build awareness by sharing our accessibility statistics with other Wagtail creators.
• Take 30 minutes to watch this accessibility talk by core team member Thibaud Colas.
• Give the Wagtail accessbility checker a try.

If you need help or make any interesting discoveries, please do share them with us in the Wagtail Slack community. You can also join the #accessibility channel to keep track of ongoing accessibility efforts and discussions.

Fröjd releases newest version of Wagtail-Pipit

Iceland-based agency Fröjd has just released version 8.11.0 of their Wagtail-Pipit boilerplate, which combines Wagtail with a React-rendered frontend. The newest version includes support for Wagtail 5.0 and Django 4.2.

Check out the release notes for Wagtail-Pipit

Package updates

• wagtail-model-forms (0.2.5)
• wagtail-mautic-integration (0.0.1)
• wagtail-cjkcms (23.5.1)
• wagtailgeowidget (8.0.0)
• wagtail-trash (1.0.1)
• wagtail-meta-preview (2.0.1)
  

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Until next time, thank you for reading! If you have a news item to contribute or a package release to report, please reach out to us through the Slack community or email us.

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