202008accessibility

Introduction

There's an EU directive coming into force in September that means Public Sector websites need to meet accessibility guidelines- see https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:OJ.L_.2016.327.01.0001.01.ENG&toc=OJ:L:2016:327:TOC and https://siteimprove.com/en-gb/blog/how-to-prepare-your-public-sector-website-for-the-eu-web-accessibility-directive/

Methodology

Observations are based on assessing a GeoNetwork 3.10 implementation with the SiteImprove Accessibility plugin for Google Chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/siteimprove-accessibility/efcfolpjihicnikpmhnmphjhhpiclljc

This classes the issues as either Errors, Warnings or Reviews, for each of the three levels (A, AA, AAA). It also assigns a responsibility to each of them- Editor, Webmaster, Developer. For GeoNetwork the responsibility is mostly irrelevant though.

Initially I looked at restricting tests to the main public-facing (no login) pages on the site:

Homepage
Search
Default record-view page
Canonical formatter page (srv/api/records/UUID)

I also restricted my test to A-level Errors only. GeoNetwork didn't do so well, however as it's a single-page application hopefully we can fix many of the issues once. The canonical formatter page does better (as you'd expect) and it would be relatively easy to fix it to pass level AA or higher.

There have been other issues about this recently (see https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/issues/4694).

Here's a google spreadsheet of the issues found (one sheet for each page I assessed): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vSMa1brty2L0IQ7sVZTBIs3ef_xk8UfiGmrwnIMmOJrugCVlrC1KfVELfxkU0DLtWF_mNJjeyQvrHrh/pubhtml

Sorry I can't make it editable for some reason!

Next steps (open to discussion)

Other people review the results and provide feedback on whether problems are easy to fix
Consider feasibility of an accessibility codesprint (would need to be based on 3.10 not 4.x)
Create GitHub issues for the problems
Fix them :-)