Hi guys,
I'm coming with several ideas to improve Liferay's portal accessibility.

Community portlet:

• what do you think about adding an accessibility tab to the community portlet with some features like: tool to manage accesskeys for the community (public and/or private pages), it conforms to the point 9.5 (WCAG priority 3)
  Provide keyboard shortcuts to important links (including those in client-side image maps), form controls, and groups of form controls.
• Another feature is to generate and insert an unseen menu that allow the user to start reading the content, the navigation or the extras with a direct access, it conforms to the point136.6 (WCAG priority 3)
  Group related links, identify the group (for user agents) and, until user agents do so, provide a way to bypass the group.

Accessibility glossary portlet
Typo3 provides this feature.
All occurances of acronyms, abbreviations, definitions and foreign words wich are stored in glossary records will be automatically replaced on the whole community's articles with the explanatory markup.

Hi Boubker,

It sounds good to me. Find some specific comments below:



I really like this idea. I'd like to base it in conventions as much as possible instead of providing a lot of flexibility. That way all sites built with Liferay will use the same keyboard shortcuts (that we'll choose so that they are similar to existing de facto standards if any).



All we need to do is put a link in the theme above the navigation that links to the body and hide it with JavaScript?



Is this feature based on an existing Glossary functionality they had?

In the case of Liferay, this would be an extension to the Journal portlet? How would it work?

Hi Jorge,



It is a great idea to propose a unified accesskey system for lifery portal.


There is no standards for accesskeys shortcuts either no de facto standards. But i found this list recommended by the UK Government:

* S - Skip navigation
* 1 - Home page
* 2 - What's new
* 3 - Site map
* 4 - Search
* 5 - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
* 6 - Help
* 7 - Complaints procedure
* 8 - Terms and conditions
* 9 - Feedback form
* 0 - Access key details

And here is the list we used on our website www.beorn-technologies.com:

* 1 - Home page
* 2 - Skip to content
* 3 - Site map
* 4 - Search
* 7 - Login
* 8 - Terms and conditions
* 9 - Feedback form
* 0 - Accessibility

So tell me what do you think about that?

To bypass the navigation group

Yes, it is as simple as that... We can use the same rule Nate suggests to hide portlets that requires javascript



Typo3 provides Glossary as an extension. The accessibility's feature is based on this one.

We should do the same in the case of liferay and create a glossary portlet with accessibility's features.

Hi Boubker,

Thanks for sending the shortcuts reference. I guess we could start with the one recommended by the UK. In any case, to be able to do that we would need to let the user specify what is the role of each page. Right now we use a convention based mechanism to let the user specify that a given page will act as the login page (if the friendly URL is /login), and in 5.2 that it will act as a create account page (if the friendly URL is /create_account). I'm not sure if that approach could be extended for all the cases listed in the UK reference.

Do you have any suggestion with how to implement this?

Hello,

Indeed, we must distinguish two cases:

• Accesskeys to navigate through the website in which case we can use same mechanism that we use for "login page" or "create account page".
• Accesskeys to navigate over a page in this case it should be implemented on the level of the theme and taglibs (skip navigation and search).

How can we extend the mechanism to create other page's role?

I would suggest starting by inventing new conventions for friendly URLs. For example a page with friendly URL /site-map is associated with the shortcut key for the Site Map. That way we don't have to do any backend change for now.

It looks good to me. How can we proceed to do that... Is there any documentation about this new 5.2 feature : maybe a portal-ext.properties configuration?

Hi Boubker,

Since no backend logic will be necessary for now there is no need to look at the changes for 5.2. Just find a proper file to include the js or JSP logic to register the keyboard shortcuts. I think top_js.jspf could be a good candidate, although Nate should know better.

For the "skip navigation" link I guess some theme files will need to be modified.

Thanks Jorge, I will check that as soon as possible.

Regards