The Open Source Academy is an initiative designed to provide training and work experience for young New Zealand technologists. Catalyst organises the Academy to show young technologists how to participate in open source communities and to fully explore their passion for IT through freely available open source tools.
It has been running annually since 2011. We are proud that Matomo (Piwik) could participate in the Academy again this year!
What students got done
It’s amazing what a few young students can get done in four days of participating in an open source project like Matomo! They were able to quickly get started with Matomo, and continued to make useful contributions to the Matomo analytics platform.
New Darkness theme
Liam has created a new dark theme for Matomo called Darkness.
To create the theme, Liam had to improve Matomo core stylesheets and created this pull request: Reuse the LESS variable for white color across all stylesheets.
Accessibility improvements
We were lucky to spend time with Julius, a Catalyst employee who is blind. He showed us in great detail how difficult and time consuming it can be for a blind user to use Matomo. For example we noticed how complicated it was for Julius to navigate the menus, to get to the main content, and to use the calendar and the Website selector. During this presentation we also noticed that Matomo was not yet usable with the keyboard.
As a result of this session with Julius we got to work with the students to improve accessibility in Matomo.
List of accessibility improvements
All these pull requests were created by the students and have been successfully merged into Matomo:
- see the focus of menu items when tabbing through the page
- Tweaks to improve accessibility (section around graph, better tooltip, set language in html)
- Added h3 tags to widget headers
- when main Menu is focused, display submenu
- Add “Skip to content” feature when user presses tab key
- Improved accessibility by putting offscreen text in the widget title
To learn more about accessibility in Matomo check out this issue on our tracker.
Summary
Working with young students was fun and interesting. We were excited to see how much they got done in such a short time!
At Matomo and Piwik PRO we are committed to building the best open analytics platform, and we will continue to support students who want to take part in the Matomo adventure.
Be well,
