Discussions: Improve Notifications page accessibility and make options easier to understand

@Chris Knapp @Mark Golbeck I went through the accessibility issues that were mentioned and tried to reproduce the errors. There are a few questions/comments that I have.

Has the original ticket been resolved? I can see that there is no table on the Notifications page in Discussions tool, and the radio buttons are unordered. So it looks like everything is fine here.

Here are the questions I have for the accessibility issues that you mentioned in the comment:

·   ‘Expanded’ / ‘Collapsed’ state of the ‘More’ link is not rendered by screen reader either when focused on it or when activating it (pertains to WCAG Success Criteria 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value)

Can you please mention the page on which this issue is present in the Discussions tool?

·         The ‘Select a Gradebook item’ combo box is not programmatically associated with its visible label. Hence screen reader users will not know the purpose of the combo box (pertains to WCAG Success Criteria 1.3.1 Info and Relationships)

There is already a label present for this particular element. Can you please confirm if this still persists? JAWS is currently announcing “combo box collapse select a gradebook item” which seems to be appropriate. Please advise. Also, it would be nice to have a video for this issue and what is the expected outcome.

·         Accessible label for the grade input field is missing. Hence, just ‘Edit. Type text’ is rendered by screen reader (pertains to WCAG Success Criteria 3.3.2 Labels or Instructions)

I am unable to find which page of the Discussions tool is this issue present in. Kindly provide more information.

·         The row headers in the table are not associated with the data cells (pertains to WCAG Success Criteria 1.3.1 Info and Relationships)

I am unable to find which page of the Discussions tool is this issue present in. Kindly provide more information.

·         ‘Grade submission successful.’ Success message is not dynamically announced to screen reader users (pertains to WCAG Success Criteria 4.1.3 Status Messages)

I am unable to find which page of the Discussions tool is this issue present in. Kindly provide more information.

·         The options in the radio group are not grouped together. Hence, screen reader renders ‘1 of 1’ for every option, instead of correctly rendering it as ‘1 of 3, 2 of 3’ etc (pertains to WCAG Success Criteria 1.3.1 Info and Relationships)

I am unable to find which page of the Discussions tool is this issue present in. Kindly provide more information.

Also, since these issues are under an umbrella ticket https://sakaiproject.atlassian.net/browse/SAK-46311, I plan to create sub-tickets for each one to resolve the bugs. Thank you!

Consulted our Sakai 23 VPAT testing results and can verify that this is still an issue being observed with Discussions test case 1.18 (Use keyboard to access the “Notifications” option to select when to have an email sent (for Topics that allow notifications))

The following accessibility issues were observed:

·         ‘Expanded’ / ‘Collapsed’ state of the ‘More’ link is not rendered by screen reader either when focused on it or when activating it (pertains to WCAG Success Criteria 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value)

·         The ‘Select a Gradebook item’ combo box is not programmatically associated with its visible label. Hence screen reader users will not know the purpose of the combo box (pertains to WCAG Success Criteria 1.3.1 Info and Relationships)

·         Accessible label for the grade input field is missing. Hence, just ‘Edit. Type text’ is rendered by screen reader (pertains to WCAG Success Criteria 3.3.2 Labels or Instructions)

·         The row headers in the table are not associated with the data cells (pertains to WCAG Success Criteria 1.3.1 Info and Relationships)

·         ‘Grade submission successful.’ Success message is not dynamically announced to screen reader users (pertains to WCAG Success Criteria 4.1.3 Status Messages)

·         The options in the radio group are not grouped together. Hence, screen reader renders ‘1 of 1’ for every option, instead of correctly rendering it as ‘1 of 3, 2 of 3’ etc (pertains to WCAG Success Criteria 1.3.1 Info and Relationships)

Going to refer to Dr. Chuck’s Open Ed Tech Group to work on….

Thanks for retesting that, @Chris Knapp ! The issue of not being able to activate the “Notifications” tab properly with arrow key navigation will need a separate jira.

After receiving some additional guidance from Tiffany, I went back and tested this on trunk/experimental using JAWS+Chrome. I was able to tab onto the “Notifications” menu option and press enter, and when I navigated back down into the Main Content Area of the page I could navigate through and test out the newly implemented changes and everything is working fine. However, I may have uncovered another problem in the process. Yesterday, when I was trying to test this out on trunk/master, I was able to navigate to the “Notifications” menu option and press enter, but wasn’t able to select/activate it to access the reworked notifications details page. It took me a while to isolate the problem, but I was finally able to figure out that if you use the arrow keys to navigate onto the “Notifications” menu and press enter, nothing happens. The page appears to refresh, but the same, default Discussions language that is displayed when you first launch the tool still appears in the Main Content Area of the page. It appears that you are only able to select/activate the “Notifications” menu option by using tab or shift+tab to get focus on the control, otherwise, there doesn’t seem to be a way to access the notifications details page by using the up/down arrow keys to access that menu option. I was able to observe this same issue on Sakai 22, but trunk/master is currently down so I wasn’t able to test it there. I’ve attached a video as reference.

@Chris Knapp the page described in this Jira (the “Notifications” page) is completely unrelated to Forum Settings and Topic Settings. If you tested in Forum or Topic Settings, you’ll need to retest by visiting the correct page.

That said, the “Permissions” table in Forum and Topic Settings actually is a table, so it’s appropriate for it to present as such.