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Disability in the Modern World

Summary

While the overall level of accessibility implemented in this platform is surprisingly interesting, there are still some significant issues that will create problems for some users with disabilities. Beyond color contrast issues that were constantly brought up by our automated tests, the main accessibility barriers found with the Alexander Street Press platform were related to how well the site works with assistive technologies and for those who cannot operate a mouse. 

Top 3 Issues:

  1. Screen reader compatibility – information is not always reliably conveyed to users, which can create confusion. A lot of effort has been put into providing helpful messages and indications, but this has not been done in a consistent way throughout.
  2. Imperfect use of ARIA – the platform implements WAI-ARIA technology to accomplish a lot of great things, but there are still problems that will potentially make it difficult for screen reader users – some of it is related to misuse of ARIA, some of it is less than ideal implementations.
  3. Video accessibility – The media player shows issues when it comes to accessibility, both from the perspective of keyboard navigation and screen reader compatibility. There is an issue with synchronicity between the captions and the transcript that gets in the way of screen readers.