[lbo-talk] Mailman and accessibility issues

Culture Lab info at pulpculture.org
Mon Oct 3 08:09:34 PDT 2005


Please consider taking a moment to send comments to the Mailman Developers group. Laura has added adherence to accessibility standards to the wish list there. She believes may be addressed more quickly if plenty of people respond.

---------------------------- This past summer our campus converted our mailing lists and newsletters from ListProc server to a new Mailman server. There are some advantages but one thing that concerns me is that the Mailman templates like the general list information page [1] and the user specific options page [2] do not validate out of the box and are not accessible. For instance when the end user views the pages, they get form labels that are not explicitly associated with their controls. Most of culprit HTML in question is actually pulled from the python code which I do not have access to as a list administrator.

I have tried to clean up some of the markup (i.e. the markup not in python) that I have access to as a list administrator. But I don't have access to a lot of the markup like form inputs to add id attributes. I have also incorporated directions into the general information page for subscribing/unsubscribing by email.

However, the best solution would be for the Mailman developers to incorporate accessibility and web standards into the web app itself. I have contacted the Mailman developers list and asked that Web Accessibility be added to the Mailman wish list. [3]

If you are concerned about Mailman accessibility you can help by sending your comments to its developers list at: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers

To quote Jared Smith from WebAIM "If enough people ask for it, I believe they will make the relatively minor changes needed to improve accessibility." [4]

Thank you very much,

Laura

[1] http://lists.d.umn.edu/mailman/listinfo/webdev [2] http://lists.d.umn.edu/mailman/options/webdev [3] http://tinyurl.com/ey8tu [4] http://www.webaim.org/discussion/mail_message.php?id=7216

Culture Lab | Pulp Culture Collective

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