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Matthieu Aubry edited this page Jan 13, 2015 · 9 revisions

#Piwik Accessibility Analysis

Accessibility improvements are discussed in this issue: #4167

##Introduction

This evaluation was performed by Chris Hofstader of 3 Mouse technology (3MT) an accessibility consulting firm based in the US. The testing he has performed (so far) ha all been done by hand and only reflects issues encountered by a person with a total vision impairment using a screen reader that delivers information by speech only. the first round of testing (all that's been performed so far) Chris used an Acer convertible PC running Windows 8.1 (all updates installed as of the date of this post) with the free (FLOSS) NVDA screen reader with the Mozilla FireFox browser (also with all updates installed).

Chris has very poor braille reading skills (he's a typical American blind person in that regard)so it would be prudent to also find a tester who can try everything to ensure that data is being presented to braille readers properly. It is unlikely that Piwik itself would do anything that would break braille but not speech but one never knows.

When he gets the time, Chris will run some automated tests against the Piwik interface to ensure full compatibility with WCAG 2.0 available of accessibility support, the requirement under Section 508 for use in US federal government installations. This is a feature that GoogleAnalytics cannot boast and it could be a way for Piwik to unseat GA in the federal government space.

##The Piwik Main Screen

When a user logs into Piwik by typing a URL into the address bar in a browser they find themselves on this page.

  • Based in guidelines for basic accessibility, this page passes fully with no changes.

###Suggestions

As there is nothing that needs to be done on this page to achieve basic accessibility, no one at Piwik needs to do any work on this page. It would be nice, however, if the top level menus, "Actions" and so on had a header tag so one needn't tab through all of its submenu links just to get to the next menu. Again, this isn't essential, it's a nice to have.

##Visitors

When a blind user clicks on the "Visitors" link they encounter the following problems:

  • At the first heading on the page, one hears "Evolution over the period." Everything following this heading until the heading that says "Report" is inaccessible. Because this object is used on a number of different screens, I've added it to its own section near the end of this report.

Everything else on this page is fine.

##Visitors/Visitor Log

  • I found one minor accessibility bug on this page. At the bottom of the page, after the table, I hear "clickable 20" an item without a label. This says "20" but I don't know "20" of what? Learning the Piwik interface further as I tested other pages, I learned this meant how many items to display in the table. This should have a label attached like "Items to show" like on Amazon. If the label would make it look funky, you can use html to only allow text browsers and screen readers to see it.

Otherwise, this page is good.

##Visitors/Custom Variables

Note: Chris doesn't exactly understand what the things on this page so he may miss somethings here. As, on his Piwik installation, it only says, "There is no data for this report," he can't really test it either.

##Visitors/Settings

  • Right after the "Browser Families" one hears "link" followed by "clickable" and these seem to do nothing at all.

Everything else on this page is accessible.

##Visitors/Locations & Provider

  • Right after the Heading "Visitor Map" a screen reader continuously hears, "clickable graphic" (I didn't wait for it to stop talking but it said this no fewer than 20 times). These graphics should have alt-text tags added to them saying what they are a graphic showing. Again, if this is a purely visual feature and these clickables do nothing that cannot be done through some other part of the Piwik interface, the HTML5 sections thing could work to just make this "invisible" to screen readers so users of such don't need to encounter such a noisy element on the site. If, however, these clickables provide a route to a feature that cannot be reached otherwise, you'll need to add the alt-text tags.

  • After the tables, I hear a number (5) after the data tables that says they are clickable. As above, I'll assume that this means how many items to display in the table. Adding a tag that says, "Items to Show in table" before the integer would be really helpful.

  • After the tables on this page, there are two links that say "display a table with more metrics." Unfortunately, it provides no way for a screen reader user to know which of the two links does what. More descriptive alt-text on these links would be great.

Everything else on this page passes.

##Visitors/Time

  • After heading, "Visits Per Local Time has the same blank link and clickable after the heading that says nothing other than "link" and "clickable."

  • Visitors Per Server Time also has the unlabeled link and clickable.

  • I couldn't find any data tables on this page. There are links to display simple tables and tables with more metrics but no tables at all. Is this by design?

  • The simple tables are entirely accessible. Is there a way that someone could choose them by default as this would fix the strangeness of finding headings with no useful information after them.

##Visitors/Engagement

  • This page, like the prior one, seems to display data in graphics and a screen reader user gets no useful data until he requests a simple table. Again, if this could be a setting, "always display simple tables" or something like that, the problem could be worked around easily.

  • After the "returning Visits" heading, one hears a lot of "clickable" without any labels. There's also no "show simple table" under this heading.

  • This is the worst page, accessibility wise, I've encountered so far.

##Visitors/Real Time Map

  • When I go to this link, I get a "no data for this report" statement and, then, nothing interesting. I don't get enough traffic to always have people online so this may be hard for me to test. I have heard from another blind software engineer, though, that he's using it so it's at least partially accessible and it may be entirely so. I've asked him to do a quick evaluation of the page and will add his comments when I get them.

##Action/Pages

  • In the Pages table, the entry for index.html uses a graphic that contains a lot of "noise." Could the alt-text for this graphic be changed to say only, "index" or "index.php" or whatever? This isn't a major problem it's just annoying noise.

  • In the table, there are things that say "Tag" or "2007" which, when one clicks on them, they get another table. In the Tag" example, it looks like a list of search terms and not "pages" that visitors had gone to. The problem here is that the meaning of "Tag" in a list of URI is ambiguous. What does this mean? What is this information? Could something more descriptive than "Tag" be possible here? I see these things in the URL field and I don't have pages with these names on my site.

##Actions/Entry Pages

  • This page seems entirely accessible with the exception of the strange entries in the table with names like "Tag" and "2007."

  • I think this applies to a lot of the tables that look like this one, sometimes, I hear "/index" but not on the first time I encounter it. There's probably some sort of transient graphic popping up. This is an accessibility problem that I don't know how to solve so someone should look up remediating such online somewhere.

##Actions/Exit Pages

  • This has the same problems and successes of the other "Actions" men items.

Page Titles

  • Same as the other Actions menu items.

Site Search

  • This seemed to be as accessible as any of the other Actions pages. However, I get very few site searches so some of the would be tables just say that there's no data for the report. Someone with more data should give this a try.

##Actions/Outlinks

  • Same as rest of "Actions" menu.

##Actions/Downloads

  • As I have nothing a person can download from my site, I'll skip this page as I have no data to look at.

##Referrers/Overview

  • Like the "Evolution over Period" thing on "Visitors/Overview" it is not accessible on this page either. It would be helpful if, in settings, one could select "tables" or "graphics" and have a text HTML table for this information instead.

  • Otherwise, it's accessible with some of the same issues listed above (two links that say "show table with more metrics" should be more descriptive so one can know the difference).

##Referrers/Search Engines and Keywords

  • Seems similar to other pages with tables. Same repeated link text but, generally, accessible.

##Referrers/Web Sites & Social

  • Seems similar to other pages with tables. Same repeated link text but, generally, accessible.

  • Using NVDA with FireFox on Windows 8.1, the table for "Social Networks" cannot be found. I've seen it before but cannot remember with which screen reader. NVDA is pretty good on being standards compliant so maybe something small but weird changed in the Piwik code?

##Referrers/Campaigns

  • I haven't tested this feature yet.

##Goals

  • I haven't tested this yet.

##Settings

  • The "report to load by default" uses HTML tables for formatting in a non-standard manner. The result is that the radio buttons are separated from their labels, making it difficult to know what radio button one is selecting. A radio button group can be made accessible quite easily and you can find how to do that on numerous web sites.

  • Selecting a radio button, using NVDA Windows 8.1 did not work using the standard keystrokes for. This is likely an artifact of using a peculiar radio button group as well. [Oddly, this is easy to do with VoiceOver on Macintosh but, for specificsI'll post if anyone cares, I stopped testing with Mac as there were too many bugs in the combination of VoiceOver and Safari that are not present in NVDA/FireFox]

  • Put a heading, perhaps "Default Report" above the default dates so one can easily jump passed the User stuff that I never change.

The rest of this page is accessible

##The "Evolution Over Period" InfoGraphic

Right now, this is not accessible at all. Nonetheless, it is information that I'd like to see and use. There are a variety of ways to make an InfoGraphic accessible and, when I come back to add more information, I'll post links to sources of places where one can learn to do it as it is not my area of expertise.

  • A reasonable solution would, as I suggested above, a setting to "always use simple tables" as the Piwik simple tables are all accessible as are tables with "more metrics." Of course, the "evolution" graphic doesn't seem to have a simple table alternative so that would need to be built.

  • The "ideal" accessibility solution for this would be the accessible info-graphic techniques. We can probably get the WCAG 2.0 approval without it though.

##The Calendar Control

This is somewhat accessible but would require some work to make it fully so. We will write up a separate report on this control as making such accessible can be tricky and I want to get input from another on our team more knowledgeable about such things.

  • It would, however, be really nice if, along with the calendar control, Piwik had a combo box with the same items as in the Settings/Date Range to load by default. As I struggle with the calendar control, I tend to just go into Settings and change the report period there so having a combo box would be really helpful.

##Conclusions

Piwik is already profoundly more accessible than Google Analytics. When Piwik gets these issues remedied (most seem really easy fixes)we will have the 3MT Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 expert do a final review to make sure it will pass the federal government testing for such and we'll help promote it as an accessible alternative to GA in the public sector.

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