How we scale inclusive website content with automated testing and open source tools

Since launching the CivicActions Accessibility website, we’ve had 9 contributors on GitHub and many more contributing to our guide, playbooks, and posts.

We value openness, agility, inclusiveness and continuous improvement. Ensuring that our site is consistently built makes it easier to maintain in the long-run.

As our website grows, we want to ensure our content mirrors our values — and that it scales with ease. So, we have enabled automated testing (and some updating) of text when it’s submitted in a pull request.

Content goals that match our values

It is important that this site demonstrates our values by being accessible and professional. That’s why we eliminate unclear, insensitive language that could alienate our audience.

Automation is not full-proof. It doesn’t have context to understand why a sentence is structured a certain way or why particular words are used. It is a tool in our arsenal to help us continuously improve, like catching terms that might be offensive or simplifying complex sentences, and so on.

The technology

Most content changes are done through plain text editors or directly on GitHub. So, many of the conveniences that are built into modern word processing applications aren’t available. The following tools help us keep the quality of our [...]