Evergreen master / 2.6
As we continue to work out the issues surrounding bug 1187993 and the significant accessibility breakage that occurs with autosuggest enabled for the purposes of screen readers, it has been suggested at least once during the last Hackaway by dbs and others to disable by default the autosuggest feature of Evergreen until we can resolve the problems with it. This will not necessarily extend to disabling in the upgrade script for sites (they should decide themselves to leave it on or off), but by default we should not ship a feature that is known to be broken now.
Given the release notes for 2.6 (see 2.4.8 note in http://evergreen-ils.org/downloads/previews/RELEASE_NOTES_2_6.html) will highlight efforts made towards better compliance for WCAG (see bugs 1268636 and 1301599 for dev references), which includes the line "To make the catalog more accessible to users with a range of disabilities, including blindness and low vision...", I feel very strongly that we should move to disable autosuggest for new installations before the final release of 2.6.0 so that we can keep to this general purpose.
Opinions? (working branch to follow pending some initial discussion)
+1 to disabling autosuggest for new installations. For those who have not seen the previous bug report on this issue, I encourage you to watch the screencast that demonstrates this serious issue - https:/
When autosuggest is enabled, the catalog is unusable for blind users who are using the JAWS screen reading along with IE. It isn't just a matter of the catalog becoming difficult to use. They have no way of knowing when their cursor is in the search box and therefore do not know where to enter their search terms. One of our sites received many complaints about their catalog being broken for blind users after they enabled autosuggest, and they eventually had to disable it. Until this problem is fixed, the community should not be doing anything to encourage sites to use this feature.