Accessibility with Story Maps

AndyAnderson — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 18:28:29 GMT

Hi, I just read this article about the accessibility features in Story Maps:

Improve accessibility of your Story Map by adding alternative text

Unfortunately despite your valued efforts, we’re finding a lot of holes, enough so that we’re getting pushback on using Story Maps in any official way.

In general, when we run a Story Map Journal through Wave on Chrome or Firefox:

WAVE Chrome & Firefox Extensions

a ton of issues pop up, for example on one Story Map Journal it lists 19 errors. I haven’t gone through them in detail, but a couple of basic things I noticed were:

1) Many unclosed or interleaved tags, e.g.

</button>

2) The use of aria-label= isn’t being read by Jaws, according to our accessibility tester. Perhaps this is because it’s missing the role=img attribute=value pair.

<button class="visible-on-focus return-to-content bottom">
Return to narrative
</button>

</div>

Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.1

ARIA: img role - Accessibility | MDN

3) Tables used for layout purposes

4) “Linked image missing alternative text”

5) “Missing form label”

6) “Empty form label”

7) “Empty heading”

😎 “Skipped heading level”

You get the idea. Wave can be used to elaborate.

Thanks,

— Andy Anderson

Re: Accessibility with Story Maps

AimeeStephens — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 17:24:41 GMT

One accessibility feature I would like to see with StoryMaps is the ability for the viewer to change the background or foreground color. This can help viewers with visual or cognitive impairments read and comprehend the information. If this feature is already available, please disregard my comment. Thank you.

topic Re: Accessibility with Story Maps in Classic Esri Story Maps Questions

Accessibility with Story Maps

Re: Accessibility with Story Maps