Geonetwork accessibility enhancements

[kkoistinen]

Dear Geonetwork team,

We had recently an accessibility evaluation on our Geonetwork based INSPIRE discovery service Paikkatietohakemisto https://www.paikkatietohakemisto.fi/ . Our service is running on Geonetwork 3.8.2 and we have done just minor edits to the default configuration. Unfortunately the results were not very good and the service is not compliant to the EU web accessibility directive.

The tools used in evaluation

• NVDA Screen reader
• SiteImprove

The major findings from the evaluation:

• Session timeout issues -- Screen reader never finishes reading the session timeout info box -- You get a warning for coming session timeout but can't extend your session any way -- Timeout causes that you lose all edits that you have not saved

• Keyboard focus issues -- You can't get focus to all elements by using only keyboard -- There is not enough contrast between selected and non-selected UI objects -- alt-attributes are missing from buttons -- You can't remove or reprogram keyboard shortcuts

The full accessibility evaluation report is here: DirectiveOnWebAccess-Paikkatietohakemisto.pdf

Are there any future plans to enhance the accessibility of software? Deadlines of the directive are already in this autumn.

[pvgenuchten]

Hi @kkoistinen, thank you for that extensive work. I'm looking forward to work with the community to improve the accessibility aspects of GeoNetwork in the scope of that directive.

To me the most important part to make fully accessible are the public-facing pages. Not necessarily the Editor and Admin pages. What do you think?

[kkoistinen]

Thanks for your interest and fast response @pvgenuchten !

I agree that public pages should be fixed with highest priority.

In our case Editor pages are used by 100+ different organizations. With such large number of users Editor should clearly meet the accessibility requirements too. It's a lower priority issue but should be solved at some point. Maybe fixes to keyboard focusing issues in Editor are quite similar to those in the public view?

[archaeogeek]

Hi, we're also interested in this. I agree that the public-facing pages are the highest priority- we have looked at the home page, the search page, the default record view, and the formatter page linked to in the sitemap. Does anyone know of any work that has been done on this yet?