Compatibility/Contribute
Help make the web more open!
The web is meant to be open and accessible to everyone regardless of how they access it. Help to keep it open by contributing to Web Compatibility. We need your skills, insight and opinions to help reach keep the web open globally.
Advocacy and Regional
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- Spreading the word
- How you can help: Talks, tweets, blogs, videos, handing out flyers on corners
- Skills required: Passion for a free and open web
- Description: The more users and developers are aware of web compatibility the better! You can post as small as a tweet or as big as a blog, we can use your help spreading the word.
- Get started: Follow us on twitter, join our mailing list or come chat with us on IRC in #webcompat. To learn more browse the compatibility wiki or read our blog posts.
- Casual bug reporting
- How you can help: During your web travels if you notice a website works properly in one browser but not in another, you can report a bug to help get it fixed!
- Skills required: Being awesome, takes two minutes
- Description: One of the great things about Web Compatibility is once you know what to look for it’s much easier to notice potential bugs during your regular browsing. If you notice a problem with a website you can report it in less than 1 minute with the Web Compatibility browser add ons.
- Get started: Report site issues at Webcompat.com or install a browser extension for Chrome, Firefox (29+), Opera and Safari for the fastest bug reporting experience.
- Outreach: Contacting web sites with fixes
- How you can help: Find contacts for websites. Contact websites with suggested fixes.
- Skills required: Web research and communication
- Description: Once a compatibility bug is analyzed a fix has been suggested, the site should be contacted to notify them of the issue. Your language skills and local knowledge make finding contacts easier. Find a contact at the website and send them a polite message. We have a tool to help explain the problem to non-technical contacts and email templates to make communicating in other languages easier.
- Get started:
- Create a Bugzilla account
- Find bugs that are ready for the site to be contacted. Use Bugs ahoy!
- Use the simple bug tool by going to this link and adding the bug number you're working on to the end of the URL. Example: http://webcompat.com/simplebug/#mozilla/966310
- Don't be afraid to ask for help! Mentors are assigned to most bugs for this reason. If you want to talk something over just comment on the bug that you some need help, a mentor will be notified and reach out to you
- Learn more about finding good contacts and contacting websites
- Collecting information on popular sites in your local region
- How you can help: Build lists of most frequently used sites in your country/region
- Skills required: Knowledge of popular web sites in your region
- Description: In order to ensure websites are working in Firefox all around the world, we build lists of the most popular sites in specific countries. The list usually starts by taking the top 100 sites for the region from a site like Alexa.com then asking volunteers to add and refine the list as makes sense. The list is used to perform automated compatibility tests for each site in that region.
- Get started: Check for your country to see if there is a top 100 sites list already created and start adding. Please leave your changes highlighted in another color so we can update the master lists. If you think a site on the list is not important for the region, leave a note beside it but do not delete it. If your region is not listed or there is no link for a top site list let us know so we can add it.
- Regional Ambassador
- How you can help:
- Skills required:
- Description:
- Get started:
Testing and Technical analysis
- Testing websites for compatibility issues
- How you can help: Test popular sites in your region and file bugs. Use screenshot application, install an automated testing program or manually test
- Skills required: A keen eye for spotting visual differences
- Description: Compatibility issues occur when a website is broken for one browser, or is providing a lesser experience than what another browser receives. You can help identify these issues through a few ways. The easiest way is using the screenshot tool to compare screenshots from different browsers, if the sites don’t match reasonably well, that’s a bug! You can also use other automated testing tools if you want to get fancy, or do it the old fashion way and manually test sites from the regional site lists.
- Get started: //maybe hallvors can help to write this *screenshot vid*
- Analyzing Web Compat Issues
- How you can help: Assign a bug to yourself and dig in. Each bug has a description of the issue to read, test the site and look through the code to find the issue. Bonus points if you can suggest a way to fix it.
- Skills required: Knowledge of web coding, CURL, user agent detection
- Description: Compatibility bugs that have been reported need to be analyzed to identify the cause of the issue. The way to analyze varies by the type of issue. The most common issues found on mobile sites are related to User Agent detection, Javascript libraries and vendor specific CSS/JS (webkit).
- Get started:
- Read this wiki section
- Create a Bugzilla account
- Use Bugs Ahoy! to find some mobile bugs to work on. There are lots of blogs with information of common issues and tools to use. This post is a good start for detecting User Agent issues on the command line.
- There are also older desktop compatibility bugs which need to be analyzed. These bugs are an easy introduction to analyzing compatibility issues. There's also a walk-through video to get you started.
Writing code
- Building tools for automated testing
- How you can help: Build tools that run through lists of sites and perform tests to identify compatibility issues
- Skills required: JS, Your favorite language
- Description: The web is big, really big. In order to test sites for compatibility issues and keep track of regressions we rely on a healthy share of automated testing. We have a few tools at our disposal that work very well, but there’s always room for improvement.
- Get started: There are lots of ways you can help, read about our current tools and reach out when you’re ready to start.
- Web coding
- How you can help: There are lots of great features that need to be built for the compatibility websites and tools.
- Skills required: JS, HTML, CSS, Python/Ruby/PHP/Your preference
- Description: Web Compatibility hosts a few web sites/tools that make our jobs easier and help spread the word. There are lots of current and future features that need to be worked on. We can use your help to code these sites and tools.
- Get started: Check out the open issues in the sites & tools and dig in!
Translation
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- Translation
- How you can help: Many sites and tools built for Web Compatibility are only in English, your help translating goes a long way to bringing the effort to more countries around the world.
- Skills required: Languages: English + more
- Description: Web compatibility is a global effort, that has sites and tools which should be available in multiple languages. Translating these can help others get involved, let site owners understand the reported bugs and help supporters spread the word.
- Get started: Check out the translation guide to see where you can help.