8 - floralint

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  florallint

Inspiration

Testing for accessibility is a fundamental part of the development process that is often neglected in small and big problems alike, making a huge amount of the web inaccessible for people with disabilities. Current tools for testing accessibility are clunky and web based, by making a tool for the terminal, most teams are going to be able to include floralinter into their development pipeline.

What it does

Floralinter tests the urls of a website for compliance with the WCAG 2.0 standard, it does this by running a command from the terminal.

How we built it

We decided to built it using python 3.5, making use of the following libraries: urllib and BeautifulSoup. The reason we decided to implementing it using python is so everybody can install it on their systems via pip, and use it in their CI process with Travis, and tools alike.

Challenges we ran into

Testing for accessibility is quite complicated, because several of the failure criteria defined in the WCAG 2.0 standard depend on heuristics in order to be properly tested. Due to this, we are currently working on implementing the stricter failure rules first, leaving the rest for when we have time to discuss them at depth.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As always, it is very important for us to be open and be source. So we have opened this project for everyone to collaborate and discuss, in the case of this project it is even more important due to the great impact that this project could have on every single development project.

What we learned

We learned that accessibility is a crucial issue in the modern world, that does not get enough attention. We also learned why it doesn't have the support it should, and the answer is that it is hard. That is why we have also implemented the infrastructure necessary to increase the scope and reach of the project.

What's next for floralint

We are going to continue development, until we have a comprehensive tool to test a website for accessibility. As a matter of fact we would love to invite everybody that reads this to work with us over at github.

Built With

• python