Accessibility review and accessibility improvement of the Ushahidi Platform Client

Project Description

Ushahidi is a global not-for-profit technology company that develops integrated tools and services to enable people to generate solutions and mobilize communities for good. We build our open-source software with the intent of strengthening communities and improving lives, empowering users to rapidly and purposefully gather, analyze, respond and act on data and information.

Since our founding in 2008 as a tool to monitor and map post-election violence in Kenya, Ushahidi’s crowdsourcing tools have been used by thousands of groups and millions of people to raise voices, inform decisions, stop suffering and influence change.

In 2023 a new version of the Ushahidi Platform Client for both web and mobile was released. While accessibility was in the mission of the project, there are still issues to be found and fixed.

Goals

• Evaluate and identify where the Ushahidi Platform Client does not follow the WCAG 2.2 guideline

• Perform an accessibility review of the Ushahidi Platform Client

• Log issues for the issues found in GitHub

• Prioritise and scope the issues found together with your mentor

• Work on improving the accessibility based on the issues found during the review

• You will also be joining internal planning calls, all-hands calls, and other communication between the team members at Ushahidi.

Internship Tasks

Pre-tasks, during the contribution period

1. Get set up with the developer environment

2. Work on issues open that are selected for this internship

Internship-tasks, during the internship

The Intern will start by doing a full accessibility review of the Ushahidi Platform Client and evaluate how it conforms with the WCAG guidelines 2.2. We aim for level 2 of the guidelines. The outcome of the review will be documented in a report and issues for violation of the guidelines will be filed in GitHub for further work. Depending on the outcome of the review, the intern will, together with the mentor, prioritise and start working on the issues to improve the accessibility of the Ushahidi Platform.

Intern Benefits

The intern will get the opportunity to develop their skills and talents in Front End development at the same time as they get to be in a team, experience how software development is planned for, performed and evaluated at Ushahidi as well as get an introduction to Open Source Development.