DSpace 7 accessibility (WCAG / section 508 / etc)

Jeremy Echols

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Jun 17, 2019, 3:35:17 AM6/17/19

to DSpace Technical Support

Hi, I'm working with DSpace 6 and finding that remediation of accessibility failures is a huge chore just for our theme alone (requiring changes to core Java code and XSL files just to do things like add labels to form fields). As we saw posts about accessibility in the past, we had been hoping the situation would have improved for DSpace 7, but looking over the demo site hosted by Atmire, it actually appears to have gotten significantly worse.

Is there a group dedicated to accessibility for DSpace 7? Should I be filing tickets as I run into problems, or is the demo a very early prototype? Are the core developers aware of the issues and simply haven't yet dealt with them? Some issues are so trivial that it seems unlikely that there's widespread awareness, but I know nothing of Angular or how the core team operates, so maybe I'm jumping the gun here.

Detailed problems are listed below. I found these in about fifteen minutes, so this is far from an in-depth audit. Note that many of these are WCAG level A -- which means, essentially, that they are critical priority and block a large number of users from accessing the site. It also means that under most jurisdictions, a university could be in legal trouble if they stood up the site as it exists today.

- The pages have no defined language, e.g., <html lang="en">

- Over a dozen fields have no labels, particularly within the search filter area

- There are images used as links which have no alt attribute (or other alternative text)

- The search page's filters are tab-accessible, despite being visually hidden, so keyboard focus just gets lost for several links

- There's no way I can figure out to open up the search filters with just a keyboard without actually clicking one of the hidden links

- There's at least one misuse of aria, where an <a> tag is given a role of "button", but its behavior isn't actually button behavior (spacebar doesn't activate it, for instance)

- Some links have a title but no text. Depending on browser and screen reader combination, a user may have no idea what's being presented.

- I can't figure out how to use the date slider with just a keyboard.

- There are dozens of instances of low-contrast text

Tim Donohue

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Jun 19, 2019, 3:41:32 PM6/19/19

to Jeremy Echols, DSpace Technical Support

Hi Jeremy,

Yes, the Demo site of DSpace 7 ( https://dspace7-demo.atmire.com/ ) is a very early prototype. That said, the DSpace 7 team does not yet have an accessibility expert or group working with us (we've attempted to find one several times on lists, but no volunteers have stepped forward as of yet). If this is an area of interest to you or others on this list, we would love to find a way to work with you on reporting and resolving such issues. The end goal is to ensure DSpace 7 aligns with these accessibility requirements once released. However, as you've seeing, this has proven to be challenging so far without volunteers willing to help contribute to an accessibility analysis. Our development team is doing our best, but we admittedly haven't yet run our own accessibility analysis (as development is still very active).

In any case, we welcome anyone to report accessibility issues as *bugs* in DSpace 7. Since these are at the UI level, the easiest way to report them quickly would be to submit them to GitHub Issues for the "dspace-angular" project (the new UI): https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/issues I can then work to ensure they are categorized & assigned to a developer to resolve the issues prior to our 7.0 Beta Release. At the time of our Beta release, we plan to also run a formal Community Testathon and ask for institutions to perform a formal accessibility audit. However, the more issues we can find *before* Beta, the better off we'll be. While some issues may be rather trivial to resolve (especially if they are just missing HTML tags or attributes), the earlier we get started the better off we'll all be.

If you have any questions about how to report these issues as bugs, let me know. If you or others on this list would like to contribute on a more regular basis around accessibility, I'd also be interested in talking further about whether there's enough interest in forming a Working Group or similar to help the DSpace 7 development team on an ongoing basis.

Thanks for reaching out, and for any bugs you are able to submit. This is a much appreciated contribution to the upcoming release!

Tim

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Tim Donohue
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DuraSpace.org | DSpace.org | DSpaceDirect.org

Jeremy Echols

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Jun 20, 2019, 8:58:26 AM6/20/19

to DSpace Technical Support

Okay, thanks for the thorough response! Since it's something we're very likely to adopt, I'll definitely spend some time filing issues. I can't really commit any time to doing anything beyond that, though I will poke at higher-ups and see if there's any interest in getting more involved. (DSpace is like 5% of my total workload since it's one of our most turnkey projects)

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