Accessibility in Web Design- OpenROV Forum

For the accessibility assignment, I decided to look at the OpenROV forum. The project itself is large and multifaceted, but one would imagine that the forum, being relatively simple web design and meant for human interaction only (rather than attracting customers, say) should be accessible.

SiteImprove

Using the SiteImprove accessibility checker, I found that the user avatar images have titles instead of alt text describing the user. There were multiple instances of low contrast text as well. Link text was insufficient to determine where the link leads in many cases and aria-label was not provided for many links.

SiteImprove-OpenROV Forum

JAWS ScreenReader

Image titles were enough to describe images instead of alt-text. While aria-labels were provided for some buttons they were insufficient to describe the button out of context. The button for following a topic was not accessible via the screen reader and keyboard alone.

Some improvements that can be made immediately are increasing the contrast ratio on low contrast text, adding more descriptive links or adding aria-labels to the links, and making all buttons keyboard accessible.

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