Enhancing Accessibility on the Information Transparency Platform
One of the nine goals at the heart of the Information Transparency Initiative (ITI) is to ensure that the multilingual content on icann.org is accessible to people with disabilities. Ensuring that we remove the barriers to engagement with the content on the Information Transparency Platform (ITP) is necessary to enable and encourage participation.
As the team continues to progress with its work, we wanted to provide an update on our efforts to enhance accessibility on https://icann.org.
What is Accessibility and Why is it Important?
A website is considered accessible if it is designed so that people with disabilities can use it. This includes visual, auditory, physical, speech, and cognitive disabilities or neurological conditions.
ICANN has modeled its practices after the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 A/AA success criteria, which were developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). ICANN organization (org) retained TPGi – an external, third-party accessibility solutions provider to ensure the features on ITP follow these guidelines.
Where Are We Now?
TPGi provided a comprehensive accessibility audit report that reviewed 10 user journeys and 59 individual components for several ICANN website-related features and pages. We worked hand in hand to review accessibility standards in ICANN’s content for the following features and pages that have been released:
- Acronyms and Terms
- Accredited Registrars
- Announcements
- Blogs
- ICANN Account
- ICANN Careers
- ICANN Homepage
- ICANN News Subscriptions
- Public Comment
- Registry Agreements
Identifying and validating conformance to WCAG 2.1 A/AA standards was performed through a combination of accessibility scan engines, manual accessibility tests, and inspecting the underlying HTML/CSS implementation. Assistive technologies were used to:
- Test components with built-in browser magnification at 200%.
- Test components to confirm they are keyboard operable.
- Test common/key components using JAWS and NVDA on the PC desktop, and VoiceOver in Safari on the Mac desktop.
- Test the common/key components using ZoomText with Chrome.
Findings and recommended changes from the accessibility audit report have been categorized and are being addressed based on priority, with the most critical areas largely addressed.
As new features and pages are developed and released, the team will ensure that in addition to best practices, accessibility will be built in.
For more information about the ITP, please visit https://www.icann.org/iti. If you have any ITP-related questions or comments, please contact the team at: informationtransparency@icann.org.
Source: ICANN Blog