I've been scanning pages on our website to see what kinds of A11Y
issues we should take care off. I'm concentrated initially on issues
on our most popular pages as well as issues on the template, since the
template generates the repeated headers/footers nad navigation on
every page. We'll get more 'bang for the buck' if we can get the
template perfect.
Some of the kinds of issues I'm seeing:
1) The site-search button and input field in the upper right of the
template. These were not coordinated in the best way. Since there is
no associated label for the input field, I added a "title" attribute,
so what we have now looks like this:
<div class="topsrchbox">
<input name="resultsPerPage" value="40" type="hidden"/>
<input name="q" id="query" type="text" title="search query"/>
<input name="Button" value="search" type="submit" class="topsrchbutton"/>
</div>
2) The home page uses <h2> headers to mark the main options on the
page, e.g., "I want to download OpenOffice". But there is no <h1>.
The doc I read said this inconsistency can confuse navigation via a
screen reader. One option might be to make these all be <h1> and then
adjust the CSS accordingly. Or maybe they should be an <ul> list?
I have no made any fix here yet.
3) For each of the choices we seem to have two hyperlinks going to the
same place:
<div class="action-help">
<div class="action-text action-link">
<h2><a href="/support/">I need help with my OpenOffice</a></h2>
<p><a href="/support/">Help is at hand whenever you need it.</a></p>
</div>
</div>
This repetition makes navigation via screen readers unnecessarily
chatty. Is there some way we can eliminate the redundant links?
4) I read that the navigation menus, which we have on the top of every
page, as well as on the side of many prominent pages, will be read by
screen readers, making it harder to get to the actual main content of
the page. I saw some recommendations to add a "skip navigation" link.
Another source said the navigation links could be enclosed in a
<map>.
5) The contrast in our navigators, with dark blue text on a pale blue
background is 3.7:1. This is lower than the 4.5:1 recommendation for
low vision. Since these colors are part of our visual scheme and our
branding, we'll need to think carefully about how we can improve this.
(Note: we don't necessarily need to change the hue. Using a darker
shade for the text, or a lighter one for the background might work)
6) We're missing a language identifier on most pages.
I'll continue investigating, but that is what I've found initially.
If anyone has ideas for these items, please let me know.
Regards,
-Rob
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