Accessibility Improvements Needed in the Catalog

[John Amundson]

Tested in Evergreen 3.5 and 3.7.2.

The public catalog could use some improvements to help with accessibility. This applies to both the TPAC and the BOOSTRAP catalog.

We had a library staff member check out the catalog using Windows Narrator and came upon these problems. They could be improved to increase quality of life for users.

- There are no "skip to content" or "skip to search results" links
- On search result pages the facets appear before the search results in the document flow, so getting to the search results takes a long time.
- For each record in the search results there is a redundant link as the cover image and the title are contained in separate links with the same destination.
- We have icons representing formats such as "book" and "DVD". Frequently (maybe always?) such icons are followed by text spelling out the format. These icons have alt text that repeats the word that follows making for unnecessary repetition. (Narrator reads "DVD image DVD" or "book image book".)

There may be more.

[Benjamin Kalish (bkalish)]

It would be great to have feedback from regular screen reader users (I am not one myself) but I am tempted to say that the greatest offense here is the lack of skip links. These would mitigate problems in the document flow and, if implemented so that they are visible when focused, would be useful to anyone navigating with the keyboard, whether or not they were using a screen reader.

[Stephanie Leary (stephanieleary)]

The skip link was also reported in bug 1744629.

I've created a branch to handle the redundant alt text for icons and book covers: https://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/Evergreen.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/user/sleary/1965985-opac-format-icon-alt

This is just a partial fix for the issues listed in this bug; I have not addressed issues of document flow and navigation in this branch. Note that bug 2015153 is also related to landmark/heading navigation problems.

[Stephanie Leary (stephanieleary)]

To test this:

1. Search for something in the OPAC that has a cover image
2. Inspect the cover <img> tag
3. In the inspector, check the alt attribute. It should be empty instead of saying "Book Cover" or the item's title as it did previously.
4. Repeat for the image icon. Its alt attribute should also be empty.

Since the other issues mentioned have been addressed in other bugs, this is all that's included in this branch.

[Terran McCanna (tmccanna)]

Confirmed, tested, signed off, and merged!