WCAG 2.1 Compliance for Digital

[bldunn25]

WCAG 2.1 Compliance:  

As a new customer about to launch our Community, I am curious if the Community is WCAG 2.1 compliant.  I tried searching but was unable to locate any information.

285 million people worldwide have a vision disability preventing them from reading all content on a website; 39 million of these are blind and cannot access any content via sight.  (Source: World Health Organization)

At my organization, when we discuss web accessibility, we’re referring to the practice of removing barriers that prevent interaction with -- or access to -- content by people with disabilities.

23% of web accessibility-related litigation in the U.S. since 2000 has happened in the past 3 years alone. But that doesn’t mean the rise is exclusive to America, we are seeing it on a global scale.

Failing to address web accessibility presents more than just a regulatory problem for us. It represents the potential for lost opportunity and revenue for the company.

Would appreciate if you could share or link me to content about your community solution and adherence to WCAG guidelines.

Thanks in advance!

b

[JakeR]

For many years we have done quite well at being compliant when it comes to addressing users with disabilities.  12+ years ago, when we were still a bit more of a start-up, we had to scramble to meet those needs.  But nowadays, our platform is much more able to be compliant.

A portion of compliance is dependent upon what the customer does with their Community though.  Because we allow for a lot of front-end customization, there are opportunities to either impede accessibility compliance, or to make it fully compliant.

Check out this thread from a few years ago.

In regard to true WCAG 2.1 compliance, unfortunately, I do not know the answer to that one.  I am sending up a bat-signal for maybe some folks that do know the answer to that.

@JoeH @ScottR @JohnDe @ClaudiusH @JohnD 

[JoeH]

We have improved our compliance recently.  The person with the most knowledge here is @ChetnaS who is the PM for this effort.

[Fellsteruk]

@bldunn25 

Sadly Khoros isnt compliant from a WCAG- AA point of view somethign ive been very vocal about being a priorirty, whilst it's true that some work has been done to imporve this the fact remains that the platform "out the box"  for example still has some way to go to achive a certification. 

I have heavy customisation on my site and to a degree that has helped me as it's enabled me to fix some of the issues raised from a 3rd party audit however we did find ourselves asking, for some of the issues, should we completly rebuild an out the box component just to fix an error at significant cost and time to us. In some cases we did but other/smaller issues we've left for now. 

Whilst it's worth every penny for the customers this would help, it is difficult to jusify rebuilding something that potntially could get fixed in X or Y. 

I'm also interested to understand if a WCAG-AA certification for the out the box community product is on the roadmap and if so when? If you're after some free toos to help with identifying errors try:

• HTML_Codesniffer
• You can run a basic accessibility audit in chrome using inspect mode
• AXA, this is a chrome addon
• Contrast checker

Good luck with the launch, hope all goes well 🙂

[bldunn25]

Thank you, Joe.  I look forward to hearing more from @ChetnaS on this topic.

b

[bldunn25]

Thank you, Stephen.  Interested in hearing more on this topic!  Appreciate you sharing from your own experience.

b

[ChetnaS]

Hi @bldunn25 

We believe a good experience is inclusive for all users and are fully committed to accessibility. That said, the certifications are a moving target and standards keep changing. Hence, Khoros community platform focusses on the user experience, and is fully committed to addressing accessibility issues in the same way we are committed to fixing a UI bug.

We set apart efforts to improve accessibility of Khoros community, and currently we have a team working on addressing the 'understandability' part of the application. The kind of workflows we are addressing are:

- error identification when users are editing/updating profile details should be communicated to the user,
- when users input information in user profile settings, which leads to a change like a modal window, or change of keyboard focus etc, then user should be notified

We ensure that community has no blocked content for individual with disabilities; and we prioritise majority workflows over the one-off workflows.

In recent past, we have partnered and worked with our customers where we have resolved priority use cases, and continue to do so as the number of customer requests dwindle over time.

Critical issues that blocks content is taken with priority. 

[RobertT]

There's definitely an opportunity here to work collectively, I'm willing to bet that many of us hit the same snags or similar snags with the community and AA rating.

It would be good to pool resources and potentially start sharing solutions / working together to address some of these points. While each community is different in terms of it's UI, there's still a lot we can share and learn from each other relating to customisations and best practice.

As for core components, I'm pretty sure we'd all like to see these addressed, perhaps if we prioritise as a group this could be looked into from the Khoros side with respect to enahcements to build a roadmap for fixes.

At least this way we can start to incrementally improve the experience overall hopefully for all Khoros communities.

[JakeR]

Not exactly 'Community-related', but definitely 'accessibility-related', and it concerns our software:

https://community.khoros.com/t5/SMM-Blog/Khoros-Rebranding-and-Agent-UI-Refresh/ba-p/523679