Hello,

I have recently had reason to look at Roundcube's accessibility support, particularly for blind and visually impaired users who might consider using Roundcube with a screen reader. I am not in this audience, but I have been attempting to make myself more aware of projects, initiatives and specifications particularly related to Web development and accessibility.

It has not escaped my attention that Roundcube is often deployed alongside other solutions, typically to offer users the choice of webmail client where Roundcube is perhaps regarded as the most "desktop-like", and other clients such as Horde and SquirrelMail are regarded as being less fancy. Some examples:

https://calmail.berkeley.edu/ http://www.cms.hu-berlin.de/dl/kommunikation/email/webmail

It did make me wonder whether the less "fancy" alternatives are being used because they offer a more accessible experience to screen reader users.

As part of an evaluation of Kolab and Roundcube, I have been taking a look at the Roundcube interface in conjunction with accessibility tools such as Fangs [1], Orca [2] and Read2Me [3], also looking at the consensus around accessible Web application design. I also searched the mailing lists for discussion around accessibility issues with Roundcube, but found only the following things:

http://trac.roundcube.net/ticket/1484257 http://trac.roundcube.net/ticket/1487041

It has been difficult to find much discussion in the last five years on the topic, and so I'm hoping to get some opinions on this matter now to see if anything needs doing and could be done fairly easily to improve Roundcube in this respect.

To get started, I have been looking at what Fangs produces for the Roundcube calendar plugin provided with a full Kolab installation, trying to identify basic properties of the interface that could be enhanced to offer a potentially more navigable and accessible experience. According to various Web accessibility guides, exposing headings, page structure and links are all things that help people with screen readers. Roundcube uses headings quite successfully already, for example, although I haven't yet been able to assess how this translates to an improved screen reader experience. (My intention is to evaluate the experience with Orca and to try and devise concrete suggestions for improvements.)

Another topic that has become prominent in recent times is that of the WAI-ARIA specifications/technologies. It appears that jQuery annotates elements in the DOM with ARIA attributes, but I haven't really investigated the specific Roundcube support for ARIA. It would be interesting to hear perspectives on such technologies from members of this list.

At the moment, I'm really just testing the waters for the potential to improve Roundcube in this way. I'm not a major PHP/JavaScript developer, and the realm of Web accessibility is also rather new to me (in depth), but I'd like to know if developers on this list perceive any shortcomings of Roundcube in this regard and whether there might be convenient ways to make it better.

Regards,

Paul

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fangs-screen-reader-emulator/ [2] https://projects.gnome.org/orca/ [3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/read2me-speechify-the-web/