Re: [VuFind-General] VuFind and Section 508 Web Accessibility

[Demian K. <dem...@vi...>]

I'm not an expert in this area, and I don't currently have facilities to do testing with a screen reader or other relevant tools.  However, a few thoughts on the subject which I hope will be helpful:

1.) I ran a few representative pages of the vufind.org demo installation through the automated checker at http://www.section508.info/, and it found no obvious violations.  Obviously, there is more to this than what an automated checker can detect, but markup of the pages is fairly straightforward and the basic layout should be fairly easy to adapt to meet standards if there are any minor violations.

2.) I believe that use of Javascript can sometimes be a problem from an accessibility standpoint.  For most of the functions where VuFind uses Javascript, alternative functionality is provided that works with Javascript disabled.  However, there are some exceptions -- the "real time status" code that displays availability of items on search result screens might be problematic, and there are a few advanced features (like list management and advanced search) that do not currently have non-Javascript alternatives.  All of this can be solved, and some is already accounted for on the to-do list in JIRA, though I won't make any promises about when it will actually get done.  Of course, if there's an identified need, these things can sometimes get moved up the priority list.

Bottom line: some of the advanced features may cause accessibility problems right now.  I think the basic search functionality should be reasonably acceptable.  Since VuFind is completely skinnable, it's not too hard to turn off features that aren't right for your audience or to simplify or improve pages with accessibility problems, so with a little work, I'm confident VuFind could be used to make a section 508 accessible site even if it doesn't quite meet the bar out of the box.

I'm also interested in improving the accessibility of the default VuFind installation, so if you are able to identify any specific problems, please let me know or enter them into JIRA so that we can improve the software in future releases.

- Demian

From: Edwards, Ryan [mailto:rya...@cs...]
Sent: Friday, January 29, 2010 4:16 PM
To: vuf...@li...
Subject: [VuFind-General] VuFind and Section 508 Web Accessibility

Does anyone know if VuFind meets Section 508 web accessibility requirements?


Thanks,

Ryan

Ryan Edwards
Systems and Web Development Librarian
CSU Channel Islands
(805) 437-3198
rya...@cs...<mailto:rya...@cs...>