Accessibility and Open Source

Open Source projects can improve adoption and spread the “accessibility love” if they make their base code work for people with disabilities. Contributors can help.

More and more companies are either consuming or producing open source software. However, very few of them are thinking about accessibility. That creates a problem for both the producers (people making open source) and consumers (people using open source)

Of the five most commonly cited issues associated with open source, two of them are directly related to accessibility:

• Underestimating cost of open source software
• Skimping on usability

Open Source Problem #1: Underestimating the cost

If your organization:

• wants a particular piece of open source software
• and the software isn’t accessible
• and your organization has accessibility obligations

THEN your organization’s only choice may be adapting the open source version to be accessible. That is the position that PayPal found themselves in with Bootstrap about five years ago. Paypal decided to make Bootstrap v3…