The Openverse Biweekly update is an every-two-weeks summary of the work completed by the Openverse team.
Openverse and WCUS
Openverse will be participating in WCUS’ contributor day remotely. Details here. We’ve also had a new community member graciously offer to help out the folks at our table, so we’ll have an in-person presence as well as our remote support. @krysal and I (@zackkrida) along with @dhruvkb (for a bit) will be hanging out in Slack to support contributors.
iNaturalist and our latest media totals
This period we added +14,778,368 new images and +4,484 new audio files. A majority of these images came from our new iNaturalist integration, written by community contributor @beccawidom. We’ve so far only ingested a small subset of their collection, but have added some remarkable images to Openverse as a result. We have open PRs to make some optimizations to the iNaturalist DAG moving forward.
Call for a11y testing on our new audio track
At the end of last week we merged a substantial PR from @dhruvkb which makes major accessibility and usability improvements to our audio track component. Tracks can be played/paused, seeked (bonus tip: you can do a faster seek by pressing Shift+left/right arrows), and navigated to all from a single root element. Previously, the component required navigating to individual controls to perform a specific action. We’ve also added a helpful snackbar when navigating by keyboard that announces the available controls to users. Here’s a quick video of how it works:
Which you can compare to the previous behavior, along with observing my failed attempts to seek the audio tracks while focused on the play/pause buttons:
While we’ve done local testing in MacOS with Safari and VoiceOver, and with NVDA on Windows, we are not daily screen reader users. Frankly, we’ve also found reference implementations of audio players from SoundCloud, as an example, to be woefully inadequate in their accessibility. We would love if any regular screen reader users or general #accessibility experts could take a look at our staging audio results page and give us some feedback. We’ll be posting a full request to our Make blog later this week.
Other Highlights
- Thanks to smart diagnostic work and memory profiling from @sarayourfriend and a rapid, high-quality refactor from @olgabulat, we were able to mitigate our frontend memory leak and close the project ahead of schedule.
- It’s the last day to leave your thoughts on our team priorities for the month; we’ve had a lively discussion with several community members chiming in. Let us know what you’d like to see us work on!
- One thing we’ll definitely be working on is the Openverse migration away from using an iFrame. This will make some dramatic improvements to SEO and overall usability. Link-sharing, in particular. Stay tuned for a kickoff post on that project in the coming weeks.
- We’re making steady progress on our Catalog milestone to refactor all of our existing provider scripts. This standardization will make making bulk changes to provider script behavior a breeze, and allow us to make optimizations and improvements centrally that will improve the data quality and performance of all of our provider scripts.