[nvda] ot: Wikipedia and Bug 11555

Hi NVDA community,
I want to point you to a solvable usability problem for blind readers on Mediawiki pages such as articles at the English language Wikipedia.
For screen reader users it takes quite long to walk throught the headlines. At every single headline we hear "left bracket edit right bracket link" first instead of the real section title. This problem is called Bug 11555 and could be solved by let the edit-section-link come second in the rendered page and let the section title come first. This means to move the section edit links right next to the headings as they are in the German or French language Wikipedia. It makes it much easier to navigate by headings for screen reader users, as the link "[Edit]" is spoken after the section name instead of before it. Some sighted users must like it as well because it has been added to a few other Wikimedia projects.
If you have an account on the English language Wikipedia, you can use a piece of java script for solving this navigation problem. Unfortunately, this is not possible for blind Wikipedia readers without a Wikipedia account. This is the reason why bug 11555 should be fixed soon. Please read more at: 
http://blind.wikia.com/wiki/Accessibility_and_Wikis#Section_title_and_edit_link
Wikipedia is run by the free and open source MediaWiki software which is developed by employees of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and by a worldwide community of volunteers. Learn more at the Wikipedia article about the independent online encyclopedia Wikipedia: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
As it seems, the Wikimedia foundation and the Mediawiki developers don't believe Wikipedia has more than a few blind readers around the world and in my opinion that is not true. It could be very helpful if other screen reader users will spread the word about Bug 11555 in their blogs respectively mailing lists. Accessibility and usability for screen reader users are difficult to communicate and we have to convince the foundation and developers politely. For example, you can write to info@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Because this is an off topic posting, you should perhaps better not reply on the NVDA list. 

Best regards,  Per

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