[OpenLayers-Dev] OpenLayers and accessibility

[Thijs Brentjens]

Hi Eric.

In the Netherlands we have Web accessibility guidelines. For a project 
(called GEOZET) in which these guidelines are very important, we have 
made some changes and additions using ExtJS. So I'm not sure if that is 
okay with you as well. I haven't been coding myself, but code can be 
found at:
https://github.com/geozet/geozet. The dir ./src/ contains javascript code.

Added functionality for accessibility includes:
- another PanZoomBar, that is accessible using the keyboard. For code 
see: 
https://github.com/geozet/geozet/blob/master/src/Geozet/lib/Geozet/widgets/PanZoomBar.js
- a new renderer, for vector points, in HTML. This way the popups are 
also accessible with the keyboard.
- sorting of features in the map, so users can use Tab to go through the 
features on the map from left to right, top to bottom.

The "alt" attribute is not used on the map images though. Don't remember 
why we didn't do that.

The final result is not online yet, but the code is open source. If 
you'd like to see a working demo (with slightly data in it) in action, 
I'm hosting one here: http://nieuwsinkaart.nl/geozetnijmegen/

HTH

Thijs

On 01/31/2012 04:47 PM, Eric Lemoine wrote:
> Hi devs
>
> Some of us at Camptocamp are currently extending an OpenLayers
> application to make it accessible [*]. For this work we need to modify
> OpenLayers in a number of areas. Here are the features/modifications
> we are considering:
>
> - navigate the map with the keyboard when the map div gets the focus
> (currently the KeyboardDefaults control works with the document only)
> - make the panel buttons accessible, by using appropriate markups
> (<a>+<img>  in place of<div>)
> - add "alt" attributes to<img>  elements
>
> We'd like to avoid duplicated effort, so we're interested to know if
> others are working, or have worked, on making OpenLayers more
> accessible.
>
> Thanks,
>
> [*]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_accessibility>
>