Technical Recommendation on Globally Fixing Quotes for Screen Readers

gracekretschmer-metrostar commented 1 month ago

User Story or Problem Statement

As a veteran using a screen reader, I need to have quotation marks not break my workflow when using the screen reader.

As the CMS Product Owner, I need a recommendation on the scope and location of where to fix this problem from the CMS team before I decide how to move forward and prioritize the work.

Description or Additional Context

Steve discovered that quotes were breaking the experience of reading alt text using a screen reader. Upon further investigation, he discovered that this is a problem across the CMS platform for all quotation marks. Technical research was done to approach fixing this issue within the alt text field, but now we want to understand the technical feasibility of addressing the fix globally, across the CMS platform and how/where to approach the global fix (in Content Build, Next Build, or within CMS).

Related Work

https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-cms/issues/17444

Steps for Implementation

Review the existing research done by @edmund-dunn and @srancour
Determine the best technical approach to address the defect globally
Determine the technical level of effort to address the defect globally

Acceptance Criteria

[x] A technical recommendation on if/how to approach fixing quotation marks globally, across the CMS platform.

srancour commented 4 weeks ago

One of the ideas not captured in the research that @gracekretschmer-metrostar and I discussed after the research was done is that maybe this could follow the same solution the removing PII work did of filtering the data before it gets pulled. This could make it so that it won't matter what system does the build in the future, this quote issue will always be fixed and will fix any instance of quotes breaking things across the board.

timcosgrove commented 3 weeks ago

I've published a recommendation for this: https://vfs.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/PCMS/pages/3585736749/Recommendations+for+dealing+with+quotes+in+CMS+text+breaking+HTML+attributes+on+the+front-end

The text will follow so that it is viewable in this ticket as well. Briefly:

no changes to CMS are needed
no changes to Next Build are needed
very simple changes are needed to Content Build templates to address the issue in the places where the text is used, and these unfortunately cannot be global

gracekretschmer-metrostar commented 2 weeks ago

Synced with Erik about the path forward and she doesn't want to put any resources into Content Build enhancements, so we are going to resolve this issue by pushing Next Build forward.

department-of-veterans-affairs / va.gov-cms