planetarydata.org accessibility scan part 2

[jordanpadams]

💡 Description

[nutjob4life]

@jordanpadams unfortunately my trial period of Deque's Axe DevTools has expired so I can't use it for accessibility scans anymore.

Can we purchase a copy? If not, is there a resource at JPL we can use? I know the URS folks do a 508 scan of sites before they get a clearance.

[jordanpadams]

@anilnatha @edwardbarraza @eddiesarevalo any ideas? ☝️

[jordanpadams]

@anilnatha @edwardbarraza @eddiesarevalo ☝️ ???

[anilnatha]

I can run the scan using SortSite.

[jordanpadams]

Blocked waiting for a tool to do this

[nutjob4life]

@anilnatha that'd be great. The site address = https://ipda.jpl.nasa.gov/

[anilnatha]

@jordanpadams Do we also need to run this for planetarydata.org as mentioned in the title?

[nutjob4life]

@anilnatha, let me answer that for @jordanpadams:

"ipda.jpl.nasa.gov" will become "planetarydata.org" when the site is ready to go live.

The current content at "planetarydata.org" will go away. It doesn't need to be scanned. But thanks for checking! 😁

[anilnatha]

Thanks for the clarification @nutjob4life!

[anilnatha]

@jordanpadams @nutjob4life The accessibility scan using the SortSite software is complete and I've exported the results to our JPL gdrive [link shared offline]

We may want to cross reference this with the Axe browser plugin that is available for Chrome/Firefox.

[jordanpadams]

thanks @anilnatha

[tloubrieu-jpl]

@nutjob4life is solving the issues raised by the scan

[nutjob4life]

Colleagues:

Thanks much for the report generously generated by @anilnatha.

For some clarification, this isn't a US Government Section 508 scan. It's a WCAG scan, which given the international nature of the site is perhaps more appropriate.

Second, the new IPDA website will neither be a US Government site nor an international .int website, so we get to pick how much conformance we want–or not. Please keep that in mind as I point out what's in this report.

Errors

The scan found several errors:

1. SSL errors: After the site was moved from pdscloud-ipda to ipda, numerous image links broke. This is a WordPress issue, as WordPress doesn't seem to like having its domain changed. I fixed all that I could find. But the scan exposed two additional image links that were still pointing to pdscloud-ipda. I've fixed these as well. However, once the site then goes to planetarydata.org, we should expect image links to break again. (This is something other CMS's handle better.)
2. Broken links: There was a link to an old oodt site on the "Meetings" page. After changing the "Meetings" page the way TS and CA wanted, this problem went away. There's also a broken link to https://cnes.fr/ on the partners page. There's nothing we can do about this: the website for CNES has been down for weeks.
3. Spelling errors: all false positives except for one: archivex → archive.

Accessibility

For level A compliance with WCAG, we have to address the following:

1. Links on the Minutes page use the exact same text but go to different destinations. This has been fixed.
2. aria-labelledby references a blank element on the "Access to Data" page. This attribute not longer appears on the page.
3. The element footer must not appear as a descendant of footer. I cannot fix this, but we can report it to the theme developer.
4. The element header must not appear as a descendant of header. Ditto.

For AA compliance, there are several other issues we can address, mostly due to finicky issues with "if a color is set on one element it must be set on all elements". I don't think it's necessary to pursue this.

For AAA compliance, there are no other issues that need to be addressed.

Compatibility

Priority 1 compatibility has to do with some IE11 issues. I recommend we ignore these as Edge is now the standard Microsoft browser (and Edge is just Chrome in Microsoft regalia).

Priority 2 compatibility is yet more finicky IE11 issues. Ditto on ignoring these.

Priority 3 compatibility affects IE and Safari on iPhone and iPad and support of margin-block- and margin-inline properties, as well as some other niche CSS properties.

This is getting quite fussy, but as a safety-net I used Safari on macOS in Responsive Design Mode to browse the site as an iPhone SE, iPhone 8 Plus, iPad 7.9″, and iPad Pro 12.9″. Everything looked fine to me.

Search

We've already hit Priority 1 and Priority 2. To reach Priority 3 we'd need to add a meta description to every page. The "Yoast" plug-in could do this. Let me know if you want it installed.

Standards

Priority 1 issues with header contained in header and footer contained in footer are duplicated here. There is apparently a CSS validation error but I believe it's a false positive. There is a style element in the footer that should be in the head section and I have no idea where it's come from; this should also be reported to the theme provider as a bug.

Allegedly the title element is empty on the "Access to Data" page, but this is a false positive.

There's a @charset UTF-8 in the "Partners" page that doesn't belong, but it's harmless as the entire site is already UTF-8.

There's an invalid CSS selector in various places that is also harmless—in addition to some other CSS identifiers, and some CSS values. All harmless.

There's an invalid CSS url() in two places but the line numbers indicated are not found in the resulting HTML output.

I don't think it's worth anyone's time to try to address the Priority 2 or Priority 3 issues. If they absolutely must be resolved, then it'd be best to select a different theme altogether—or a different CMS—one that has WCAG AAA compliance.

Usability

• Underlined text: false positive.
• Keep URLs shorter than 78 characters: changed the slug for the "Archiving Components for International MOUs" to be much smaller and adjusted the link from the Recommendations & Standards page as well as on the header navigation.
• Provide a search page. True, we don't have a search box. Do we want one?

[jordanpadams]

@nutjob4life thanks for the awesomely thorough scrub of this. from your report, it sounds like we are good. I don't think we need to move forward with any of this, but kind of crazy these free themes are not accessible out of the box. but whatever.

Provide a search page. True, we don't have a search box. Do we want one?

Nah. There is really no content on the site so doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

in the end, I think we are go for launch 🚀 . URS submitted and now we hurry up and wait

[nutjob4life]

@jordanpadams