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Re: [EP-tech] Accessibility compliance

Hi Alan,

Various changes to EPrints have been made to Accessibility over recent-ish version of EPrints.  Specifically 3.4.2 focussed on front-end pages accessible to the public, whereas 3.4.3 focussed on back-end administration pages only accessible to registered users.

When producing a new release of EPrints, we test Accessibility using the WAVE Accessibility tool [1] in a FireFox browser.  Also more recently, we have also used the Axe DevTools [2] to further check for Accessibility issues.  There is a GitHub issue for 3.4.6 [3] that makes some fixes as a result of this testing  Unfortunately, we did not document very well what the specific changes that were made as part of this issue.  You could take a look at the commits under this ticket to see if they specifically fix the issue with zooming.

As EPrints can be branded to a owner's specification, this can generate Accessibility issues.  Accessibility testing its done against a vanilla install of an EPrints publications (i.e. pub_lib) repository [4].  Even though Accessibility tools can pick up a lot of issues, they are still liable to miss things.  Zooming seems likely to be one of these things as the Accessibility browser plugins typically look at the page at 100%.

I have had a quick look at a vanilla 3.4.6 instance and I can see when I zoom to 400% on the core stage of the eprint workflow, some of the fields do not fit into the space (e.g. contributors).  We do have an in-house plugin that allows compound and multiple fields to be displayed in blocks of fields rather than rows, which could be made available.  However, this layout is not quite as easy to use, so you would probably not want to use this generally to address the specific issue when zoom is 400%.

We have been working on supporting a Bootstrap theme for EPrints, which may well help deal with many outstanding issues with Accessibility.  Unfortunately, this will not be available in 3.4.x, as how it is implemented is ingrained into certain structural changes we are making for the next major version of EPrints. 

We are obviously keen to get feedback on Accessibility issues as teasing out the remaining issues is a non-trivial task and we only have limited time we can allocate to this.  I have logged a GitHub issue for your specific problem [5].

Regards

David Newman

[1] https://wave.webaim.org/
[2] https://ionic.io/docs/accessibility/axe
[3] https://ionic.io/docs/accessibility/axe
[4] https://accessibility.eprints-hosting.org/accessibility/report.html
[5]https://github.com/eprints/eprints3.4/issues/459

On 01/05/2025 10:05, Alan.Stiles [He/Him/They] wrote:
CAUTION: This e-mail originated outside the University of Southampton.
CAUTION: This e-mail originated outside the University of Southampton.

Hi,

We’re currently using customised EPrints 3.4.5 and we’ve had a few accessibility issues flagged with e.g. the user area where it lists all the items deposited by a user and that not being zoomable to 400% without requiring both horizontal and vertical scrolling.  Also for the edit / deposit workflow.

 

I wonder about the user area being classed as a data table and therefore exempt from that requirement, but I don’t think the same could be applied to the main workflow?

 

Has anyone updated these or is anyone planning to update these pages for accessibility compliance, before I dive in to see how they might be improved?

 

Regards,

Alan

 

Alan Stiles (he/him), Digital Repository Developer
Library Services, Learner and Discovery Services
The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom, MK7 7DA

orcid.org/0000-0003-3343-1088

 

 

 


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