useable

Accessible Community is committed to creating ethical technology that supports the disability community. In order to build tools that support people with all types of disabilities, we need a categorization of requirements mapped to disability. The mapping needs to be easily understandable by end users and yet detailed enough to allow tools to leverage it.

useable, coordinated by Accessible Community, associates people with disabilities’ requirements for use with broader functional categories and known diabilities. This taxonomy crosses digital and physical spaces as well as events and accommodations in a way that previous categorizations have not. This type of mapping is needed to help build tools and resources to help the entire disability community.

The useable taxonomy leverages previous work in the fields of accessibility and accommodations:

• Functional Performance Criteria provided by the United States Section 508 Standards for Digital Accessibility.
• Functional Performance Statements provided by the European EN 301-549 Standards for Digital Accessibility.
• The Listing of Impairments for adults provided by the United States’ Social Security Administration (SSA).
• Guide to the List of Recognised Disabilities provided by the Australian Government Department of Social Services.
• The disability and accommodation taxonomy provided by the Job Accommodation Network.
• Framework for Accessible Specification of Technologies (FAST) provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

We welcome comments and feedback to encourage the establishment of a worldwide mapping to help build tools and solutions for people with disabilities. Please create or comment on any of the current GitHub issues.

Repository layout

• The data directory contains the original CSVs used to generate the taxonomy.
  • When cloning the repository, you make use your local Node.js install, or the supplied Docker container.
• The site folder contains the javascript code used to build the site.
  • useable is powered by Astro.
  • The integration folder is an Astro integration that converts the raw data into Astro content.

Setting up a Development Environment

On almost every project, getting your development environment established is the first task and it can take a day or two to do so. This is a high-level overview so that you can be productive quickly.

If you don’t have one, we recommend installing an IDE that supports multiple languages (Python, Javascript, HTML/CSS, etc). The recommendations are VS Code or Sublime Text, but this is a developer choice.

The next step is to determine which development environment you would like to use. You can choose between a couple of options:

1. Running in a Docker container.
2. A direct Node.js install.

Setting up a Development Environment using Docker.

1. Install Docker Desktop or another way to run a containerized environment.

• If on Windows, we recommend installing the Linux Subsystem to help performance, but it’s not required. See configuring Docker Desktop to use WSL 2.

2. There are a series a make commands to help you run the commands in Docker. To use those, you’ll need a way to run make.

• On Windows, use the Linux Subsystem or chocolatey.
• On Mac, install the Xcode client tools or use homebrew.
• If preferred, install some integration with the IDE you are using instead.
  • For instance, Makefile support for VS Code

3. Run make serve to launch the container, install the dependencies and run the development server.

Setting up a Development Environment using Node.

1. Install the LTS version of Node on your development machine.
2. Run npm install from the site directory to install the JS dependencies.
3. Run npm run dev from the site directory to run the development server.