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OVID LWW

Summary

This assessment covers the Ovid LWW application. While obvious efforts have been made to make the application very accessible to screen readers through the use of ARIA and proper use of semantic HTML markup, the overall usability of the application remains extremely complex, both for sighted users (regardless of whether they have a disability), and blind screen reader users. This causes this application to be not intuitive, and generally hard to use.

Top 3 Issues:

  1. Lack of instructions – A lot of features on the application require users to get a visual understanding of the context in which features are provided. That context is not always given clearly to screen reader users, and as a result, they may not understand how to operate parts of the interfaces.
  2. Focus management – Every time a filter is selected in the search results, the screen refreshes and the keyboard focus is sent back to the search field, making it very difficult for sighted keyboard users and screen reader users to efficiently navigate through the application and filter through the results.
  3. Overall navigation from modals – Focus not being maintained in modals will cause issue for keyboard users, who may easily find themselves leaving modals without their knowing and be stuck with a modal blocking their view and being unable to get back into it.