Compatibility/Contribute
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Help make the web more open!
With the accelerated growth of technology we should be able access the web from anywhere, but that’s not always the case.
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 help to advocate for a compatible web both globally and locally - together, we can make the web work for everyone.
Advocacy and Regional
The mobile web is broken and you can help make it better!
- 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 which works properly in one browser but not in another, you can report a bug to help get it fixed!
- Skills required: Being awesome, only takes two minutes.
- Description: 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 and 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 saying that you need some help, and 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. We need your help to determine the most popular sites in your region. 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: Become a leader in your region and get others involved!
- Skills required: Passion for the open web, good communication skills.
- Description: Web Compatibility is a global effort that needs help in all regions. It’s your insight to local culture that gives you the chance to start a community of web compatibility advocates and contributors.
- Get started: Check what activities are going on in your region and create a new locale if it doesn’t exist. Check how-to start your own local community, read the Compatibility Guide and become an ambassador for the project!
Translation
Communication is key to any project but even more so for a global one. Websites are made by many developers in many languages, we need to be able to communicate with all of them. You can help make others understand the importance of a compatible web by helping with translations!
- 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.
User experience and design
We want users and developers to have great experiences with the web compatibility effort. We need great UX and design specialists to help make that happen. Join us to help make the web more open!
- User Experience
- How you can help: Use your expertise to help us design the way users interact with our sites and tools.
- Skills required: UX
- Description: Although we try to always put the user front of mind when designing Web Compatibility sites/tools, the expertise of a UX designer goes a long way. Help us shape the designs and interactions of the Web Compatibility toolset.
- Get started: Check out the sites & tools. Then reach out to us to get started!
- Design
- How you can help: Logos, sticker/shirt designs, improving current sites
- Skills required: Photoshop, Illustrator, Design skills, etc.
- Description: In order to make Web Compatibility stand out we need help from great designers. Everything from our websites, to logos and even t-shirts need a creative eye to really shine.
- Get started: Check out our sites, logo and t-shirt designs. Then reach out to get started.
Writing code
Do you love writing code? So do we! Part of web compatibility is providing tools that help perform automated testing, report/track bugs and help make the overall experience better. If this sounds like fun to you, join us and help make the web more open.
- 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!
Testing and Technical analysis
Bugs, they're everywhere! Web compatibility is all about finding bugs on websites and figuring out what's causing the issue. If you're an experienced developer who loves digging into code or you're just starting to learn, there ways that you can help out. You can make a difference to make the web more open!
- Testing websites for compatibility issues
- How you can help: Test popular sites in your region and file bugs. Use our screenshot comparing application, install an automated testing program or manually test.
- Skills required: A keen eye for spotting visual differences in websites.
- 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:
- To review a set of screenshots from your region, reach out and tell us what country you can help review. We may already have a set of generated screenshots to look at.
- Check if your country is already listed on are we compatible yet?. If it is, you can help with manual testing - surf some of these sites in various mobile browsers and send us the list of sites and browsers you tested.
- Help review, fix and add site tests by installing SlimerJS and clone SiteCompTester-Extension - see further instructions on GitHub for details.
- Analyzing Web Compat Issues
- How you can help: Assign a bug to yourself and dig in. Each bug has a description of the issue which you can read, test the site and look through the code to find the problem. 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.
