On Thursday 8. May 2014 08.57.40 Thomas Bruederli wrote:
On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 8:49 AM, Cor Bosman cor@xs4all.nl wrote:
European law also defines some web accessibility standards, which all government procurements have to abide by.
It certainly wouldnt hurt to make roundcube more accessible, andif a lot of work is being done to investigate and solve accessibility, please document this work and write a plugin guide so plugin authors can follow.
That's the intention of the wiki page: http://trac.roundcube.net/wiki/Dev_AccessibilityGuidelines
For reference, my previous message on the topic can be found here:
http://lists.roundcube.net/pipermail/dev/2013-June/022640.html
I did try out various Roundcube features (mostly concerning the Kolab calendar plugin, however) in conjunction with the Fangs "screen reader emulator" [1]. Various other tools were recommended to me and these are already mentioned on the wiki page (Orca, NVDA), but I don't run a system that can use them effectively (or at all, given the Windows-only nature of NVDA).
From what I found, JavaScript Web applications should still be accessible, contrary to the established beliefs in the wider Web development community. Screen readers can be aware of the DOM and are able to notice changes in it. Even Fangs, which is supposedly very simple, is able to obtain a lot of information straight from the DOM. Whether screen readers need to be actually aware of JavaScript itself is debatable, but there's useful advice on such matters out there:
http://a11yproject.com/posts/myth-screen-readers-dont-use-javascript/
(Unfortunate that the charts are broken on that page, though!)
Fangs doesn't seem to be aware of ARIA annotations and isn't able to notice the significance of the controls in Roundcube, or at least this was the case last year. However, the jQuery output produced by Roundcube does seem to be usable by screen readers in principle. I did aim to evaluate other accessibility tools, but I ran out of time.
One weird and rather specific thing I encountered was the use of "CSS sprites", at least in the calendar plugin. Some people are skeptical about this technique [2], and I think its use might need reconsidering for properly accessible functionality. On other issues of recommended practices, it looks like the wiki page summarises the pertinent WCAG guidelines quite well. I know that I went and changed some of my own Web applications after reading some of those.
Paul
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fangs-screen-reader- emulator/ [2] http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2010/03/26/css-sprites-useful- technique-or-potential-nuisance/