On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 10:39 PM, Paul Boddie <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thursday 8. May 2014 08.57.40 Thomas Bruederli wrote: >> On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 8:49 AM, Cor Bosman <[email protected]> wrote: >> > European law also defines some web accessibility standards, which all >> > government procurements have to abide by. >> > >> > It certainly wouldnt hurt to make roundcube more accessible, andif a lot >> > of work is being done to investigate and solve accessibility, please >> > document this work and write a plugin guide so plugin authors can >> > follow. >> >> That's the intention of the wiki page: >> http://trac.roundcube.net/wiki/Dev_AccessibilityGuidelines > > For reference, my previous message on the topic can be found here: > > http://lists.roundcube.net/pipermail/dev/2013-June/022640.html
Hi Paul Many thanks for the elaboration of the reasons why even Roundcube should be improved for users with special accessibility needs. In fact it's a request from a big public administration project that brought up this topic again and that made me finally start doing something about it. The things you listed in the above mentioned post are all valid and are subject to be addressed now. And once we collected our guidelines and proved that the suggested improvements work on the email part of Roundcube, plugins like the Kolab calendar module will follow. > I did try out various Roundcube features (mostly concerning the Kolab calendar > plugin, however) in conjunction with the Fangs "screen reader emulator" [1]. > Various other tools were recommended to me and these are already mentioned on > the wiki page (Orca, NVDA), but I don't run a system that can use them > effectively (or at all, given the Windows-only nature of NVDA). > > From what I found, JavaScript Web applications should still be accessible, > contrary to the established beliefs in the wider Web development community. > Screen readers can be aware of the DOM and are able to notice changes in it. > Even Fangs, which is supposedly very simple, is able to obtain a lot of > information straight from the DOM. Whether screen readers need to be actually > aware of JavaScript itself is debatable, but there's useful advice on such > matters out there: > > http://a11yproject.com/posts/myth-screen-readers-dont-use-javascript/ That's what I was hoping, too. > > Fangs doesn't seem to be aware of ARIA annotations and isn't able to notice > the significance of the controls in Roundcube, or at least this was the case > last year. However, the jQuery output produced by Roundcube does seem to be > usable by screen readers in principle. I did aim to evaluate other > accessibility tools, but I ran out of time. Fangs seems like a nice development tool but I'm still uncertain if it actually represents what blind users perceive from real screen readers. > One weird and rather specific thing I encountered was the use of "CSS > sprites", at least in the calendar plugin. Some people are skeptical about > this technique [2], and I think its use might need reconsidering for properly > accessible functionality. I think sprites are still a good way to implement graphical buttons and don't necessarily contradict accessibility guidelines as long as there's a textual representation of the UI element that is styled using sprites. There are certain elements in Roundcube's UI that need to be fixed regarding this. > On other issues of recommended practices, it looks > like the wiki page summarises the pertinent WCAG guidelines quite well. I know > that I went and changed some of my own Web applications after reading some of > those. Perfect, thanks! Kind regards, Thomas > > [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fangs-screen-reader- > emulator/ > [2] http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2010/03/26/css-sprites-useful- > technique-or-potential-nuisance/ _______________________________________________ Roundcube Development discussion mailing list [email protected] http://lists.roundcube.net/mailman/listinfo/dev
