[QA] Checking consistency/UX guideline compliance (and page content)

Fri Jan 31 18:55:32 UTC 2014

Hello -

Sumana Harihareswara and Quim Gil suggested that I post to this list
to look for ways to integrate some work we've been doing at Galois
with the broader Wikimedia efforts.  This work is all released under
an Apache license and we hope that that will enable the broadest set
of uses.

We were tasked with finding a way to help improve user interface
consistency, in a very general sense, so we developed a tool called
FiveUI to try and simplify the process of manually evaluating user
interface guidelines on HTML-based interfaces. We're at the point now
where our primary goal is to find external users; and we're able to do
some additional development to help adapt the tool to fit these user's
needs.

FiveUI takes sets of guidelines encoded in Javascript and runs them on
web sites. It works as either a browser extension in Chrome or
Firefox, or running "headless" to collect guideline violations in a
continuous integration environment (for example).

The rest of this email goes into detail about how we think FiveUI
might be useful for Wikimedia, but if you want to go play with the
tool right away, you can find it on GitHub:

 - http://galoisinc.github.io/FiveUI/
 - and http://github.com/GaloisInc/FiveUI

Or the chrome store:
 -
   https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/five-ui/bbccaefdcbnnkpmekjchefnhhaamgoom?utm_source=gmail

The install instructions and getting started documentation are linked
from the first url above, or directly here:
 - Install docs:
   - http://galoisinc.github.io/FiveUI/manual/install.html
 - Getting started:
   - http://galoisinc.github.io/FiveUI/manual/gettingStarted.html

There are a collection of encoded guidelines available on GitHub as
well.  These can be loaded by FiveUI to see some of the things it's
capable of--for example, we've implemented a subset of the W3C's WAI
guidelines here:

 - WAI guidelines:
    https://raw2.github.com/GaloisInc/FiveUI/master/guidelines/WCAG-1.0/conformance-A.json

The accessibility guidelines can help find issues such as missing alt
text, missing (or duplicate) labels, and assorted color issues amongst
a few others.  We think these could be useful checks for the Mediawiki
development process, but there are probably other areas we aren't
familiar with that could have a greater impact--we'd like to hear
suggestions!

One area that would possibly be more visible is to integrate something
like FiveUI with the wiki page editing process.  We've implemented
automated checks for a number of the guidelines in the Wikipedia
Manual of Style [1]. We imagine either a style checking bot using
these guidelines to mark pages for refinement, or even integrating
with the page preview process to point out possible violations of the
manual of style when editors submit content to the wiki.

We took the liberty of running these guidelines on a small set of
Wikipedia pages, and posted the results here:
 - http://galoisinc.github.io/FiveUI/reports/wikipedia/20140107T2328Z/summary.html
The implementations are also available on github, in the 'guidelines'
directory, if you would like to use them to look at any pages in
particular, or if you would like to see how the rules were
implemented.  The Manual of Style guidelines are described in more
detail here:
 - http://galoisinc.github.io/FiveUI/manual/wikipediaGuidelines.html

Does this look like a technology that may be useful to you? Are there
different directions we could take with FiveUI that would better
solve problems you run into frequently?

I'm happy to answer any questions, give a screencast demo, brainstorm
ideas, etc.. let me know how I can help.

Thanks!
Rogan Creswick
Research & Development
Galois, Inc.

 [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style

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