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clarin-eric / standards

work space for the Standards and Interoperability Committee
https://www.clarin.eu/content/standards
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Accessibility issues #317

Open bansp opened 2 hours ago

bansp commented 2 hours ago

I have taken a glimpse at the slides on web accessibility in CLARIN. The SIS is explicitly mentioned there with a score of 70%, which is not entirely bad, given that the best CLARIN site scores at 87%, while the worst at 50%. But we can do better and this ticket is designed to gather issues that target accessibility.

First, a list of the most important issues. I have numbered them for ease of referencing.

  1. Use good contrast.
  2. Black and white is not bad.
  3. Does it work on phones and laptops?
  4. Give alternative text to graphics and pictures.
  5. Underline your links and state the purpose in the text of the link.
  6. State the languages in use.
  7. Encode your structures. a. Use regions like header, main and footer. b. Use headlines hierarchies.

There are tools that assist in checking sites for the above properties and others. In my Chromium, I can see Lighthouse (under dev tools), but I don't yet understand its output. Another free tool mentioned in the slides is WAVE.

One thought that occurs to me is that the aesthetics of the SIS is not fully in line with the above hints (compare item 5), but we would probably prefer to keep it, at least as a default. So the first question is: how sensible would it be to install a switch from the default SIS interface to one with enhanced accessibility features? I guess I should turn that into a separate issue...

List of the relevant issues:

bansp commented 2 hours ago

To be sure, we can work on certain features (such as ensuring metainformation in the generated HTML <head> sections) without a switch. The switch would work for, e.g., link decoration, colour pallette, etc. -- the visible elements.