Accessibility review process

[James Teh]

(Also cross-posting to firefox-dev.)

Hi all,

Tl;dr: The Mozilla Accessibility Release Guidelines outline what is needed
to make user interfaces accessible to people with disabilities. If you
would like help from the accessibility team to determine whether your
change is accessible, you can now set the a11y-review flag on a bug in
Bugzilla and fill in the comment template.

While the accessibility team has always performed accessibility reviews,
the process around this has hitherto been very ad hoc and unclear. To
address this, we have now formalised the process for requesting an
accessibility review. You can find it documented here:

https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/bug-mgmt/processes/accessibility-review.html

For convenience, I've included the text at the bottom of this email.

This process references the Mozilla Accessibility Release Guidelines, which
have existed for a while but haven't been widely publicised. Among other
things, you can use these as a checklist to guide you in what to consider
to ensure an accessible user interface, whether that be during design,
development or determining shipping readiness. That document is here:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Accessibility/Guidelines

If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to reach out to me
directly.

Thanks!

jamie
------------------------------
Accessibility Review Introduction

At Mozilla, accessibility is a fundamental part of our mission to ensure
the internet is "open and accessible to all," helping to empower people,
regardless of their abilities, to contribute to the common good.
Accessibility Review is a service provided by the Mozilla Accessibility
team to review features and changes to ensure they are accessible to and
inclusive of people with disabilities.
Do I Need Accessibility Review?

You should consider requesting accessibility review if you aren't certain
whether your change is accessible to people with disabilities.
Accessibility review is optional, but it is strongly encouraged if you are
introducing new user interface or are significantly redesigning existing
user interface.
When Should I Request Accessibility Review?

Generally, it's best to request accessibility review as early as possible,
even during the product requirements or UI design stage. Particularly for
more complex user interfaces, accessibility is much easier when
incorporated into the design, rather than attempting to retro-fit
accessibility after the implementation is well underway.

The accessibility team has developed the Mozilla Accessibility Release
Guidelines <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Accessibility/Guidelines> which
outline what is needed to make user interfaces accessible. To make
accessibility review faster, you may wish to try to verify and implement
these guidelines prior to requesting accessibility review.

The deadline for accessibility review requests is Friday of the first week
of nightly builds for the release in which the feature/change is expected
to ship. This is the same date as the PI Request deadline.
How Do I Request Accessibility Review?

You request accessibility review by setting the a11y-review flag to
"requested" on a bug in Bugzilla and filling in the template that appears
in the comment field. For features spanning several bugs, you may wish to
file a new, dedicated bug for the accessibility review. Otherwise,
particularly for smaller changes, you may do this on an existing bug. Note
that if you file a new bug, you will need to submit the bug and then edit
it to set the flag.
Questions?

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact the
Accessibility team:

- #accessibility on Matrix
<https://matrix.to/#/!jmuErVonajdNMbgdeY:mozilla.org?via=mozilla.org&via=matrix.org>
or Slack
- Email: access...@mozilla.com