Esri Accessibility SIG

[Music] hello and welcome to the 2021 esri user conference special interest group for accessibility before we begin discussing esri's accessibility efforts i'd like to thank you for joining us today and invite you to submit questions throughout the session we will respond in the q a window during the presentation as much as possible and will address the remaining questions during the qa time at the end of the session until then feel free to submit your own questions and press the like on others to upload or prioritize some topics for the q a now let's review our agenda for the session we will kick things off today by introducing our panel of esri presenters and accessibility subject matter experts and then provide general information and updates about accessibility at esri because the nature of these special interest groups is to facilitate two-way conversations uh we'd like to kick-start the com the uh conversation by highlighting some accessibility features in arcgis products and existing accessibility resources otherwise we're excited to hear your feedback and engage in the discussion for the remember remainder of the session so we're excited to host this conversation about accessibility with you and are pleased to have this team of esri staff on panel to discuss accessibility initiatives across the company so let's take a moment for everyone to introduce themselves can you lead us off our absolutely i'm arjun barjatia i'm a senior ux designer for rts online and i primarily focus on keyboard and screen data accessibility as well as accessibility in terms of content authoring over to you aubry hi i'm aubrey kinghorn i work on arcgis pro and i'm incredibly passionate about accessible maps with regards to pdfs and layouts over to you sherman thanks sharmelle menzel i'm a solution engineer on the national government team and i work with accessibility and the federal agencies carl hi again everyone i'm carl france a senior accessibility analyst at esri and i work with our product development around accessibility clara my name is clara schmidt and i am a ui ux design lead on arches hub and enterprise sites i specialize in the technical aspects of accessibility and the wcag guidelines rena i'm ronan harris i'm a staff attorney here at esri overseeing accessibility and compliance matters jessica hi everybody my name is jessica mccall and i am the accessibility business manager supporting our esri accessibility program i'm also today's moderator awesome thanks everyone we're all excited to be here today and look forward to this conversation let's begin with the mission statement for our accessibility program which is deploy cross-platform strategy to drive accessibility innovation in our product development make a difference in our company culture and support our users in successful implementation of gis with robust and accessible software communicating our mission statement is important to us because there's value in defining why we care about accessibility and this mission statement is meant to be an extension of esri's core mission statement only with a focus on accessibility innovation and supporting our users with accessible technology realistically some level of disability impacts most people throughout their lifetime sometimes permanently but also in temporary or situational aspects for example we're familiar with permanent conditions of disability such as blindness and deafness but rarely consider an injured arm or being an occupied parent as a disability the truth is that changes in our physical and mental capacities are part of angie injury and sickness and occur naturally throughout the course of life this slide shows a chart identifying examples of permanent temporary and situational conditions that have direct impact on touch site hearing and speech anyone new to the field or getting acquainted with accessibility as a topic might feel a bit overwhelmed by the acronym suit that we use to discuss digital accessibility topics this slide contains many of these acronyms such as a11y section 508 wcag acr and vpat to name a few first what is a11y well the word accessibility contains 11 letters between the a and the y which has created the term a11y similar to l10n for localization and i18n for internationalization let's define a few more of these to help with our conversation today so inclusive design is simply using the design process to eliminate barriers for users of all types without special adaptations section 508 are the official accessibility standards within the us while en 301 549 are standards for digital products and services in the eu wcag or wacag stands for web content accessibility guidelines and these are used worldwide to define the conformance level of digital properties esri's current goal income is to be in compliance with wiki 2.1 double a the vp80 or vpat is the voluntary product accessibility template which is used widely to organize wiki success criteria and finally the acr is the accessibility conformance report that has been created and contextualized to a specific product as noted on the previous slide worked criteria are the current u.s and international accessibility standards and are organized into three general levels of conformance level a the minimum are most basic accessibility criteria that digital digital properties must satisfy level double a criteria address the most common barriers for disabled users and digital properties are also responsible for satisfying things level aaa are not currently required and digital properties may choose to address this level again esri currently targets the double-a standards for wikad 2.1 criteria accessibility conformance reports or acrs are the manner in which these wicca criteria are organized and how esri documents the accessibility features of our products acrs for esri products can be found in our esri legal site we attempt to keep the format and scope of these acrs maintained to current global standards and are updating all reports to the 2.4 version of the vpat and wikag 2.1 standards we've also included a contact form at the bottom of this page that can reach esri accessibility directly in 2021 we've worked extensively with core product teams to consistently update accessibility documentation including arcgis pro arcgis online and arcgis enterprise we are also prioritizing products that are in high demand or critical to our federal state and local government customers who especially need accessibility documentation for procurement processes these include many of our arcgis apps and app builders such as arcgis web app builder arcgis dashboards arcgis experience builder and the new arcgis field maps additionally we're extending accessibility conformance in support of the esri design system and our powerful field and mobile applications uh in our reports we're further incorporating incorporating international guidelines such as the en 301 549 european standards and are excited to maintain this ambitious timeline to publish and update product accessibility documentation so at this point i'd like to shift focus to a series of product demonstrations and updates about new accessibility features in arcgis starting with aubry kinghorn who will discuss esri's professional desktop gis application arcgis pro over to you aubry thank you carl i'm excited to share with you guys some of the features for accessibility in arcgis pro first off i want to talk about the setup of pro itself so right now i have pro in what is considered the light theme and so this is the standard theme for pro however if you find this hard to read or annoying on your eyes or have some other reasons that you just don't like this so it's not working for you you have the option if you go to the project tab and under options excuse me licensing is going to load for a moment before it'll let me switch to options under general i can change the application theme from light to dark this can be beneficial for various reasons um personally i prefer the light theme and it takes i have to restart the application so we're going to keep it in light theme for this demo but please know that that's an option if you prefer the dark theme or that's easier for you going back to my main screen another accessibility feature that i really want to highlight in pro is the ability to do keyboard navigation so pro has a lot of different pieces to it so you'll notice here i have a layout this is considered a layout view over here is a catalog pane and a contents pane i just clicked on all of these but if i can't use a mouse for some reason i can access all of these via keyboard shortcuts it's always kind of awkward to demo keyboard shortcuts because you can't actually see my keyboard but if i hit control tab i get this pop-up that appears and it lists all the active panes and active views and i can use my arrow keys to navigate between them so i can switch to the contents pane and i will see that that's active and i can start tabbing through um or i can use control tab again i can go back to my layout view or the catalog pane or even the catalog view which is open in my application as well and so that's a way to navigate without requiring a mouse which is very helpful there are also one-handed shortcuts available and documented one of the things that we have been really focusing on in pro recently is something you guys have been asking for and that's the ability to create accessible pdfs from arcgis pro we know that you need to share your maps and layouts with many people and some of those people will be using screen readers previously pro didn't have a good way to export layouts so that a screen reader could access them you would have to use a third-party software like adobe illustr adobe acrobat my apologies to get to turn a layout accessible in 2.8 that is no longer the case we've added support for accessible pdfs including the ability to provide alt text and create tagged pdfs and do pdf metadata let me show you how this works for certain layout elements including map frames charts and pictures which i don't have in this layout i can provide alternate text so that someone who can't see this can still understand what the graphic is showing if i right click on a graphic element and choose properties it opens up the element pane and now in 2.8 i can see a new accessibility section when i expand it i have the option to populate alt text so you avoid having to watch me type i'm just gonna copy some alt text i wrote earlier and paste it in so now i have alt text explaining what is going on in my bar chart i've listed the values being shown periods being shown in this chart i can do the same for my map accessibility alt text and i will copy the alt text i wrote earlier and paste it in and i'm explaining what is going on again it's just map frames chart frames and pictures that have alt text with them legends scale bars and north arrows do not at this point we recommend putting the information that legends scale bars or north arrows convey either by using text on the layout you can use dynamic text to show the scale or the north direction or by putting that information in the alt text for the map frame itself or you can use a third-party software again and open this after it's exported and make some additional changes to mark your north arrow etc one other thing i want to point out that's not in regards to alt text but just in regards to making an accessible pdf is i have taken the information that is on the map that's a heat map and i've included it in this table here it's not displayed in exactly the same way obviously the table isn't showing the geographic properties but it is showing the countries and the number of fossils in them which is the point of this map so that someone who can't see the map even though they do have the alt text has another way to get the information and knows that tanzania has the most dinosaur fossils in um on the african continent the next thing i need to do is export this layout so if i go to the share tab and i choose to export my layout and i set the file type to pdf i will now see a new tab called accessibility this is very important because this is where all the accessible features for the pdf live so if i click on that i can choose to include the accessibility tags you need to mark this if you want your pdf to be tagged as accessible so that a screen reader can read it and then i can supply pdf metadata metadata is not unique to accessible pdfs any pdf can have metadata however it's very important in creating an accessible pdf the screen reader will recognize a title and it can use keywords to search for things it can be the subject the language determines how the screen reader will read the text and so this is important information we wanted to put it on the accessibility pane so you could access it easily so i'll fill this out really quickly and then when i choose to export it will create an accessible pdf to show you what that looks like i've actually already run this export in both arcgis pro 27 and arcgis pro 28. let's look at the difference in adobe acrobat in arcgis pro 27 if i run a basic accessibility check i can see that my document has five issues it's not a tagged pdf so a screen reader can't pick up on this text in the table or in the title um the logical reading order needs a check there's no language so my screen reader doesn't know if this is text in english spanish french and there's no title for it to read when it starts reading the document and so these are all problems that i would have to then manually correct by using tools like auto tab document and going through i'm guessing a lot of you have done this before it's not the most fun process but if i go over into my export from pro 2 8 i can see and i run the same accessibility check i can see that my document only has two issues logical reading order and color contrast logical reading order and color contrast are always going to come up in the acrobat accessibility check because they need manual confirmation i need to determine if the log the reading order is logical which is very important in a map layout where you don't necessarily read things just from top to bottom you might have a right to left or you might need to read the title first it could be in the middle of the page and my color contrast also needs a manual check so these have to be done manually but i won't have to run auto tag document or any of these other things like i would have from a 2.7 export if i go through and look at some other views i can see that my alt text is available for my bar chart and my map and if i look at the tags i can see that my table has been tagged as a table so that it should be read properly and that my figures have been tagged as figures and my text has been tagged as text and so these are some improvements that we've made to create accessible pdfs in arcgis pro 28 we are not necessarily done with this functionality and we would love to hear what you guys need in your accessible pdfs that and what we can do to further support so please share your ideas in the pro ideas sites uh with your contacts at esri who can get the information to us that we can continue to make this better for you guys and that's my demo so i would like to turn the time over to charnel who's going to talk to you about accessibility in apps thanks aubry so let me go ahead and share my screen all good well i'm going to move on to field operations and field apps i work a lot with customers who are collecting data outside and citizen science activities so i have a passion for field apps and the arcgis system has various field apps that you can select from depending upon your needs your workflow and today i'm going to touch on the accessibility capabilities of these three apps used by field staff now survey123 has available an accessibility conformance report that's very important for a lot of the agencies field maps is in the review stage and we expect to have an acr by the end of the year and quick capture is about to begin the review so one of the reasons why i enjoy being part of this sig and all of us enjoy being part of the sig is that just as aubry said we like to hear from you and understand which products we should focus on for our next conformance report planning so let's talk a little bit more about survey123 now based on the version 3.11 release last fall an acr was provided to the public the report covers the website to create the forms and we i call it the survey web designer server 123 web designer and published forms that uh you use for people to fill out the questionnaires uh using a website i have to tell you i'm so impressed with the product teams and the developers because before the report was even made public they were already improving accessibility for future releases later this year the enhancements that are addressing accessibility planned include ensuring the web app has unique ids in the form element which is was an impediment for screen reader support adding aria attributes now if you are new to accessibilities these are the attributes in the code that identify the features for user interaction these are the attributes our developers need to add interior code for our products so for example this um let you know if it's a button it's a different action it's a curve it's a button or if it's a drop down list or if it's a table these were created by the w3c web accessibility initiative in addition improvements for contrast ratio and navigating through the repeats are currently being added so it's time for me now to show you what exists in the version available today now i'm in the survey one two three web designer worked on the farm to collect data related to the dinosaur fossils that aubrey displayed in arcgis pro it's got to collect that data and within the designer i have a color background i want to change that to an image and newer with the release is that when you add an image and i'm going to select an image from one of my files when you add an image new is the ability to add that alternative text so this is an african desert since we're i always like always type of dessert and so now we have the background and it has alt text related to it let's go ahead and look at the final form in a web browser now i have just to let you know that within a good i'm using google chrome and i have put the contrast very high my my my my background but i also have added an extra box that you'll see up here momentarily within wherever my tab is because i want to show you where my cursor is as i go through this web form so you see that i first click and it says skip to main content and just like aubrey i'm going to tell you what i'm doing with the keyboard so i press enter and i'm now in the main content and i will use my arrow keys to move over to the geological time period jurassic in this case i'm going to press tab move down to the next question and then using my arrow keys i will go to the location in this case it's egypt i've selected egypt now this is a single choice kind of a different layout within survey123 you have multiple ways of asking for input and another one is that drop down list so if i wanted to say country let me go ahead and select it from a drop down list i'd hit enter on my keyboard navigation and again let me select egypt pressing enter tab to get to the number of fossil fossils found then the discovery date now with my survey i have it automatically set to the current date today is july 15th but they found the fossils last month so i'm going to go ahead go to june 22nd and i'm going to hit enter discovery date and then finally for the location i am going to refine my location and i had to look this up for egypt and now i have my location and i have the form ready to enter and submit that's a brief look at what's available today in the web forms survey123 now on esri's roadmap for field apps we're going to be working on acr successively conformance reports that everyone wants to see related to these native apps for survey123 field maps and quick capture now these are the apps that you download from your favorite store apple or google play we expect that because we have to adhere to such strict standards to even be allowed to allow these apps in this specific app stores that there's not going to be a lot of hurdles uh to make these accessible so we're looking forward to those reports and they will be coming as soon as the review process is done i have to say that the field application product teams for field maps survey 123 and quick capture have already been working on that tab navigation including removing any keyboard traps ensuring logical tab order having that immediate access to the second level options and then with accelerator keys now these are keyboard shortcuts that improve the usability and accessibility i showed you a few there's a few more accelerator keys that being added also those aria la attributes and using esri's common design system which where there's changes to one component can be implemented across the arcgis apps so that's a brief look at the mobile apps field operations now i'm going to hand it to over to arjoff who's going to give a deeper dive into arcgis online thank you so much for now give me just one second i will get that started all right now that i'm sharing my screen we can get that started i'm not sure if my content is going to be as cool as searching for dinosaurs but hopefully i'll try to keep this interesting we're going to be speaking about arcgis online and primarily about the arcgis online homepage where we've made a bunch of accessibility improvements that i would be walking through with you today um so we would be looking at the home page to begin with and we have the option to edit the home page on the page so i will go in and open the home page editor we have options to manipulate the content as well as manipulate the design one thing to point out is that the content you put on the page typically is unique to the organization and therefore it is hard to assume how we can make that accessible but we can take steps to make sure that in terms of color and typography we provide you a very accessible solution for your homepage diving into colors we provided two different options here and i will speak to that in just a second so we have uh the preset themes and this is the recommended route that the designers of arcgis online have kind of put together so that uh no matter what team you select they would be maintaining uh the contrast level for the text for each and every block of content that you have on the page um so an example of that would be going in and right now you can see that i have the gray theme selected um i can hit enter to open the menu and go ahead and select something else like the green theme for example what that does is that it automatically applies different styles using shades of green to your whole page and you do have the option to then um go in and make those changes so that let's say that the reserve for uc demo this particular content block you want it to be a different shade of green you can go ahead and do that and one thing you would notice is that automatically the foreground color that is the text color has changed and this ensures that there is a sufficient amount of contrast with the background um so using preset themes in colors is one way to ensure that all of the text content on your page is accessible to your customers the second option that's available under colors is using custom themes and what that allows you to do is use your organization's brand colors this is a very popular request amongst people who customize their arcgis online home page they want to represent their brand and make sure that when customers come to the page they have a similar experience as their other web offerings so this is where you can add a custom style so i will hit enter and open the add custom style model and one thing that we've made available here is a contrast and legibility checker so this is an offering that we're hoping to permeate across august online but basically what that allows you to do is you can set up your own custom theme with the different brand colors you want for the background title summary and the link color for any block of content on your homepage and when you go in you can go ahead and select different colors and um what this legibility and contrast checker would do is it will look at your link or summary or title color compare it with the background and provide you a value of contrast which helps you understand if that particular content is legible or not legible so in this case the link in button color is uh not legible and this is based on vcac standards for contrast and color requirements so contrast ratio or four and a half or above is recommended as a aaa value for small to medium text and we in this case we've also applied it to the large text if i have a not legible color and i choose to hit save we would warn you again we will let you know that this contrast is not sufficient to ensure legibility for all users and at this point we give you a choice this is your home page and you do have the choice to proceed with your brand colors but if something is not legible we would recommend going back and changing that to appropriate color in this case i would just cancel out at this point and i do have two custom themes set up already and i've used contrasting uh colors to set it up what i can do though is go into the apply a style section and i could provide i could apply these two custom colors to alternative styles and what that does pretty much is it gives me the ability to create this striped effect on the page and um in in this way i can have like multiple brand colors available on the page and still have a really aesthetically pleasing experience for uh our customers one thing you might have noticed is that there doesn't seem to be an apparent effect on the cover image section and this is where we can go into the header section and make some of those changes so there are two options for cover images as well you can use a stock cover or you can use a custom cover what we've done with the stock cover is provide you a variety of options where when i would select a different stock cover like this one automatically the title color would adjust and we would add a layer of opacity so that no matter what title color you have selected there would at least be a certain amount of contrast available in order to improve legibility i do have the option in this case to switch to something else like this and this is where you can see that layer of opacity is very apparent at this point you could choose to switch to a different color and the color that we used for opacity would change automatically so that again there is sufficient contrast between the cover and the background this works pretty well on the stock covers that we offer but it is also applicable to the custom covers to a certain extent we would recommend not to choose a dock cover with a dark title and a light cover with light title but even if you do you do have this option to manipulate the opacity so i would enter the layout options and i have the overlay opacity slider i would manipulate this and adjust accordingly so one thing to note here is if you really try and remove that opacity layer chances are your context content might not be visible on the image you selected so we would recommend maintaining it at at least a medium value so that even a combination of a dark image and dark text would still be legible we have spoken a bit about accessibility in terms of colors there is also the notion of accessibility in terms of typography and in in this case we're primarily focused on selecting languages that can be translated into a wider sorry selecting fonts that can be translated into a wider variety of languages so once again we provide you with two options you can use the preset themes or you can set up your own custom theme we would recommend starting with the preset theme since these two fonts that we have combined together tend to support a wide variety of languages so we have the default as title and body but you could switch to something that has a serif and a sensor of combination so in this case it's a very simple one button solution and it applies to your whole page simultaneously another option if your organization has specific brand fonts that they want to use they provided some commonly used fonts that you can create a pair with so you can create a title and body pair that applies to the page and um i open this menu for the title font and in this case i'm going to be selecting roboto and i can do um i can make a different choice or i could select roboto again for the body font as well so it is a very quick and effective way of making these changes the set of 12 fonts that i demonstrated right now includes some classic fonts like uh vadana and times new roman as well as some more modernized ones like roboto and monstera but again we've tried to maintain a list that has that can be translated easily at least in a few languages um these are kind of the main features that uh we have updated in the homepage editor um one thing i would point out the editor itself we have a number of keyboard and screen reader updates so that you can navigate more successfully within the editor and in addition to that we do have onboarding information that you can access by hitting enter on the information icon and it gives you a little bit of information about these preset and custom themes so this is something you can access under typography or under colors um this is pretty much what we have for the arcgis online homepage editor today and i would be handing it back to carl over to you thanks a lot our job and thank you to everyone you know that panel of uh demonstrations see i'm gonna jump back into this deck can someone confirm we can see that great um so i'd like to rejoin the discussion um at this point at the end to point to a few more useful resources uh the first is a reminder that our uh the arcgis excessive accessibility conformance reports are located on the esri legal site and additionally esri's statement of commitment to accessibility and details about esri product compliance with u.s and international accessibility standards as well as common questions about accessibility can also be found here next the esri community for accessibility if you're not yet familiar with esri communities uh please visit and interact with esri customers staff and others in the gis and geospatial professional community the connect collaborate and share experiences here finally i'm very excited to announce a new information and resource site dedicated to esri and arcgis accessibility so this site provides a lot of information about accessibility at esri including arcgis accessibility articles and blogs best practices documentation such as the conformance reports educational videos and presentations and uh a lot of additional resources you'll be able to contact esri accessibility from any page in the site directly through our contact form we are absolutely thrilled to have introduced this to the sv.com ecosystem and look forward to expanding upon this moving forward so thank you for following along with us this far at this point we want to know how we can help you what types of resources are you looking for is it training or documentation what accessibility topics are most important to you uh perhaps assistive technologies such as screen readers um what questions or comments about arcgis accessibility do you have we'd love to hear from you um to any other esri staff on the call please feel free to jump in but i'd like to invite jessica into the conversation to help moderate uh this q a portion thanks jessica hi everyone great to have you here there are some really great questions and there's a lot of them so we're gonna try and get to as many of them as possible um i think that uh the first one that we wanted to address i'm going to address to clara and the question comes from anonymous as someone who is neurodiverse autistic and adhd found quite a few story maps maps and applications hard to use what i want to know is what are some strategies and guidelines for accessibility for neurodiversity uh clara can you take that one sure so at a high level i know the w3c is actually looking for more people that fit that um that have that neurodivergent thinking because they don't have a lot of explicit guidelines so the things that i know about i've learned from shell little and i learned during like an accessibility um conference a little bit earlier this year but she talked about how having um one of the things that like some of the things that can be difficult for neurodivergent is having unavoidable unavoidable motion flashing or blinking content things that auto play like auto rotation when um captions do are missing from audio or video that's included and sort of some of those dark patterns that exist on the web so i know this comes up this has come up within hub we are often asked for a carousel and we just aren't building out the feature because we don't want to do an auto rotation carousel that would be distracting to users that come into the system unfortunately i don't have a lot of other information but if you look her up she's got a lot of good information on the web so that shell little from wells fargo thanks clara appreciate that uh another question that we have um and i'm gonna address this to aubrey i see that you already kind of replied but maybe you can just talk about it a little bit because there were a couple questions related to it uh it'd be helpful to have an option for pro not just dark or light um the dark theme uh and the light theme sometimes don't have enough contrast is there another way for a user to adjust this yeah that's a great question so we don't have an ability to adjust things in pro itself you can use some of the windows tools to change the contrast if that works for you but what i would recommend here is to share this on the arcgis pro ideas site you take that site very seriously and if there are some applications that have a theme that you think works really well and provides a good level of contrast um for your work please share that with us so that we can check out kind of what that contrast looks like what that color scheme looks like and consider using that in future versions of chrome thanks aubrey so we had a couple of different suggestions and questions about uh learn lessons as well as video demos i think that that is something that we are definitely looking at and i'm kind of answering for all the teams and that you know the learn lessons yes that's definitely something that we want to pursue with our product teams there are also um you know other resources that carl pointed out that are available on our website right now but blogs videos learn lessons those are all things that we're exploring with our teams and like aubry just said one of the best ways to engage is through our arcgis community all the product teams have um a place where you can give them ideas and there is also the accessibility community which we listen to as well um there was a question from lucas and carl i'm going to address this to you is there a site that lists what esri products have accessibility functionality available and which ones don't but are planned et cetera yeah let's talk about our program thanks yeah this is a great question i think we we often are asked about you know which products have which accessibility features and of course as i said there's so many and we organize around what keg that currently the documentation that we have per product at the product level are the accessibility conformance reports what that does mean however is a certain uh understanding and level of comfort with wicca success criteria you know because those documents are organized by the uh by the wak success criteria so that and those documents are absolutely the the closest you'll get to having a really specific understanding of accessibility features related to any arcgis products um and then i saw some chats come through or some messages in the chat come through like for example about other uh other resources like for arcgis pro is there anything about how to use it with a keyboard and the answer is yes that like per product if you look at the product pages there are some supporting documentation um and language there in a in addition to the blogs that we put out around the use of our products so the accessibility conformance reports are very specific and then the blogs and the videos um are more descriptive of how to use it but we don't have um a page that or a site that directly says which success criteria are being met by which product um and we definitely encourage uh anyone you know interested in the products to look a little bit more deeply into those product pages and certainly the performance reports thanks carl i appreciate that let's look at a couple of other questions uh we have another one that was asking about alt text um i think that that one actually came in a couple of different forms uh would somebody like to take that one maybe uh clara do you want to talk a little bit about alt text the what makes good alt text yep what makes good alt text that would be great um so all good alt text is in this question it's better to be succinct than use long flowy language even though i know sometimes it's tempting to use to pack a lot of keywords in there because seo also like sometimes but that's not the best practice to use your alt text for seo um so what you want to do is you want to avoid using image of or picture of because assistive technologies will already pick up on the fact that the image is considered an image element and they'll be communicating that um so being succinct using details from surrounding text especially if the image offers something that the surrounding text does not offer so if there it's a picture of something that isn't displayed in the text you want to communicate that if it is super redundant to the text so say i have an author's picture next to the author's name i might actually want to hide the author's picture profile picture because it wouldn't offer a lot of unique information to their name rather than describing what they look like um and so that's that would be my recommendations for good alt text thanks clara um there's another question specifically about um colorblind friendly maps our job i'm going to direct this question to you i think you may have issued a reply but be great to discuss it anonymous says i've started using the windows display filters to view my maps for colorblind friendly maps and apps it's not just the symbology that we need to examine totally agree is there a plan to incorporate filtering the display directly in arcgis products uh so one thing that the new map view does is include colorblind friendly ramps so in terms of building maps within axios online that would be my recommendation where you would select a colorblind-friendly ramp as well as select an appropriate base map so that the combination would ensure a good experience for someone who has color blindness thanks archer there's another question that's come in here about arcgis pro and online maybe aubry and arjaf can tag team on it but i'll start with aubry do any of the accessibility information that you add into arcgis pro translate to arcgis online if you publish the map that was a great question so um and i didn't clarify this during my presentation but the accessible stuff i was showing particularly alt text and so on that is done in the layout so it's not set on your map so if you publish a map it doesn't get persisted because it was never set on the map to begin with it was set on the map frame in the layout however if you share an accessible pdf layout to your arcgis online account then you will have the accessible functions of the pdf available but we don't right now have a way to provide information from the map itself to arcgis online when you publish via pro am i correct on that ardoff i would think so yes and we can confirm that as well great thanks guys there's another question that's come in about uh gis analysts who have disabilities and carl i'm going to address this to you what advice would you give to sgis analysts who have disabilities and work with gis it's a fantastic question and i think that every member of this conversation um would love to join the panel of people trying to answer that question and create i think tools and technology that are the resources the tech the tooling that you need what one thing i would like to speak to is that at esri we definitely look at accessibility and disability through the social model we don't look at you know the user as the barrier as much as we look at the technology being the barrier um so all of the work that we're doing on you know uh the teams across the platform championed that model that while there is a lot of development progress to make on our side um you know we are looking at disability and accessibility through that social model lens and because of that are incredibly interested in creating software that removes the barrier to begin with and then as i've seen some of the questions in the chat provide um functions and within the tooling to help create accessible products right and so my what i would like to say shortly is stay in contact with us and i'd open this up to other people on the panel too but the point i wanted to make was please meet us in the middle help us understand the help us understand how our technology is meeting your needs or the needs of people you represent and help us understand that and stay active in communication with us via esri accessibility contact form at the bottom of every accessibility or site on our esri accessibility site as well as the other paths to reach us through ideas through our community site um yeah that's that's my instinct on that question is there anyone else on the panel that has a perspective on that i would love to say something if i could um i think the biggest thing that i love about gis is there are a million ways to solve any given problem every time i look at a problem and i solve it one way i'll talk to my friends or colleagues in different industries and they will have solved it a completely different way so one of the cool things about working as gis analysts if you have a disability or you think differently is you still get to solve your problems and you can show other people a better way to do that too so i second what carl says about keep us in the loop because we want to learn from your solutions to do things that can make it better for people who have the same challenges as you or just people in general who can benefit from your unique way of thinking and doing things that we can maybe integrate into our software or share with our user community thanks guys appreciate that we have about 10 minutes left in our session so we're going to try and get through a few more questions uh sharmel there was a question that came out that i thought maybe was related to your presentation that i wanted to address uh is arcgis indoors viewer or mobile app accessible and do you want to kind of talk about maybe mobile accessibility a little bit hey thanks yes um arcgis indoors has a viewer application which is online and um while i guess carl you could confirm this arcgis endorse has not been under a review or or jessica um no so we um but it we would like to find out again from from you if that's a high priority and what issues that you have addressed now i have to admit that even though we say it's not been under the review it doesn't mean that it's completely you know inaccessible we are we when we add components to one of our applications uh like the arcgis online instant apps they can be integrated into apps across the platform across the system into like arcgis indoors viewer so we want to work with you a little bit further i i responded directly to him but the esri accessibility esri.com or also that esri community in um uh for accessibility i put that link in a couple of my responses so i can't wait till after this session how active you guys are going to be in that session we're going to be there with you answering those questions you have wonderful ideas yes thanks shermell uh there's a question that's about specifically our vpats and ronan i thought maybe you could take this question um it says have our vpats been updated to reflect accessibility features do you want to talk a little bit about our repats yeah of course that's a good question so we work continuously to make sure that our our vpats acrs are updated um as consistently as possible we want our users to you know be up to date and in our levels of conformance and accessibility with that in mind what we have currently we as a us-based company we utilize the revised section 508 uh vpat um as uh which is what cac 2.0 however as carl alluded to and talked about a little bit what we also do is provide a level of customization there with that we've now since included levels um wicack 2.1 level double a to account for our international customers who are now moving to the with that standard make sure that it's clear and concise in one document for not just our us-based customers but our international users as well awesome thanks ronnie carl i'm going to uh point this question to you it's from olga it says that i've noticed many of the esri web applications have inconsistent menus and commands for instance clicking user profile the upper right corner is different in the hall map and dashboards is there anything planned to do with this maybe also our job you can contribute a little bit as well this is a really interesting question and i think i think it points to the general like cohesion right like how cohesive is a platform in terms of its design and development and so what you see what you've seen over years are arcgis products um becoming more streamlined and more consistent using more components from our uh design system and working to consolidate even some you know we did have some for example mobile apps um collector and whatnot that are now being uh uh some of our field operations mobile apps that are now being kind of pulled under an umbrella under field maps right and so those consolidation and um design and development i think streamlining efforts are how we mitigate this problem because yes you will see that um and i and i think that yeah the the more we move forward and work to streamline and consolidate our design and development voice through that design system the more consistency we can expect to see moving forward i welcome anyone else from the panel to uh contribute to that as well i i think i would echo what karl said like uh as you mentioned like rds online uh for example uh as we're striving to use more and more uh components from esri's uh design system you should be seeing that it getting more consolidated and as it's getting more consolidated and using the same component you should have the same experience when interacting with a keyboard master screen reader [Music] thanks guys appreciate the time on that question uh we have about two minutes left in our session so we're going to do a couple of really quick and fast questions see if we can get a few more in a question for carl uh do we have lists of accessibility features or failures for the individual story maps and web apps type again that's the conformance reports we have on our accessibility conformance reports pages via esri accessibility or and esri legal accessibility thanks uh arjoff why doesn't esri build an integrated accessibility checker app that works on web app builder um and that could be falso for aubry since they do mention adobe related pdfs i think when it comes to any mapping component and or in our web maps or apps that's kind of where it gets tricky uh where it's not always like we cannot always be certain that something is accessible or not based on the content that's being used which is unique to a user or an organization but including more integrated accessibility features that's something esri is driving for absolutely like as you saw with the uh with the home page editor where we had uh like an integrated check for contrast uh like any opportunities like this we would definitely uh try to capitalize on and uh hopefully you should see that more in future updates i think we've got only just a few seconds left so i really want to thank everybody for your time on these questions if your question didn't get answered you're more than welcome to reach out to any of us via the tiles on the main screen and you know we're happy to help you in any way that we can you

Channel: Esri Events

Views: 517

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Esri, ArcGIS, GIS, Esri Events, Geographic Information System, Esri Accessibility, ArcGIS accessibility, accessibility, a11y, WCAG, Section 508, user conference, 2021, uc, esri uc 2021

Id: g0-gE-uVneM

Length: 59min 56sec (3596 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021