As has been mentioned before many times, the maintainers of the openstreetmap website could use some help! There are so many open issues and PRs needing input, and the team can only cover so much ground.
So here’s an idea: using the forum to bring attention to potential opportunities for new contributors. On today’s issue:
Required skills: some knowledge of Bootstrap and web accessibility, or at least being willing to learn them! Note that we use Bootstrap to simplify our styles, and prefer to use it over custom CSS or JS whenever possible.
Please note: this is an opportunity to learn. We don’t want AI-driven contributions; we could do that ourselves. Please see the policy on AI-Assisted Contributions for more info.
So anyway, what’s the issue about?
You may have noticed that changeset comments have a “chain” icon that is not very self-explanatory:
This is a link to the specific comment. It’s useful when you want to share it with others, as in “look at this specific comment in this changeset”. This can be more useful than sharing a link to the whole changeset, as there could be several comments on it (and perhaps more to come), and it might not be clear which one you are referring to.
So perhaps a tooltip would be good? Something like: user hovers the mouse over the icon and a little tooltip shows up that reads “Link to this comment” or something like that.
But it’s also worth remembering that not everybody uses a mouse. What about smartphone users, tapping their finger? And sight-impaired users with text-to-speech navigation? Questions to consider…
Hey Pablo. I’m interested in contributing to accessibility, but don’t have Bootstrap experience, and am not regularly involved in coding (although I understand the basics & semantics of it).
What exactly are you after here? Someone to code the solution on the GitHub query? Or someone to just come up with a suitable wording, assuming the coding and UI work will be done by someone else?
(Also - see the bottom of every one of these community messages for a fairly well-designed example of UI for this “copy link” function… caveat I haven’t tested this in a screen reader or WAVE accessibility test or similar.)
Thank you! Ideally I’d like someone to contribute a full Pull Request to GitHub, including the necessary code.
Now, I know this might be a bit of a big ask! Even though the specific requirements I list are “Bootstrap and Accessibility”, there’s also implicit requirements like “ability to create a PR on GitHub” or “get the website running in your computer so that you can verify your work”, which perhaps I should have listed too… I’ll offer myself to help with those as well. I want new people to try the development environment and report how it goes for them. Are there pitfalls we haven’t discovered? How many people try, fail, and we never hear of? I actively want to be contacted to see how we can improve.
As for the Accessibility part, I raise it because there’s always the risk of a custom solution that for some reason turns out not to be accessible. By default, if it’s done with Bootstrap it should be fairly accessible. Still it’s good to keep an eye just in case. I don’t fancy myself an Accessibility expert, my checks are a bit cursory. No need to check every last use case, I just wanted to offer some examples when mentioning smartphones or sight impairment.
Another thing is that if you come up with something and can create a PR, you can make it a “Draft PR” (an option in the “create PR” dropdown button) and ask for feedback. I’ll be there to help too.
Keep asking questions! Here or wherever works best for you: DMs here or at osm.org, ping me on public posts, email the address found in my Git commits, etc
icon that is not very self-explanatory:
