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Accessibility and colour schemes in the web portals and tooling (all versions)

TimStaddon
over 8 years ago

Hi,

Open discussion really, on the broad subject of accessibility in the user interface.

I'm a developer who's had to consider the use of screen reader/magnification technologies like Zoomtext and JAWS, and accessible colour schemes, when writing Win32 software in the past. 

I do know people who need extreme colour contrast in user interfaces due to severe visual impairment, migraine sufferers who cannot work with bright white backgrounds, people on the autistic spectrum or with dyslexia who find it easier to read text on a pastel background. A common one is colour blindness, the most common forms may mean users may find it difficult to differentiate between shades of orange, red, green or brown.

For Firefox derivatives, two browser plugins can help users of websites which don't offer a choice of colour schemes or skins: Greasemonkey and Stylish. With these plugins it's possible for the end user to recolor websites, change fonts, grow/shrink/hide objects and more.

A better answer is if admins/developers can set a theme, colour scheme or "skin" as a default, but allow users to choose an alternative from a list - or even configure their own.

I've been through the Web Designer documentation, through Web Designer, and explored the UI as an end user - and while there are lots of individual layout definitions, CSS rules etc in addition to what looks like a couple of different colour schemes provided out-of-the-box (e.g. a blue one, and a Dell one), there's no option that I can find which would allow an end user to switch between them.

More to the point, I can't see any entry point for configuring a default style (or alternate styles) in the web project.

So has anyone extended the web UI to support skinning, or high contrast / custom colour schemes?

  • over 8 years ago

    Tim,

    There is a CSS class d1im-highcontrast that you can set on the <body> tag of a document. This enables some CSS rules that override the default layout to increase contrast and focus visibility.

    Please refer to the manual for more information on how to automatically activate this setting for users.

    https://documents.software.dell.com/identity-manager/7.1/web-designer-reference-guide/frequent-tasks-in-the-web-portal/settings-for-increased-accessibility

    I know of successful projects where theming was implemented. Most of the problem was reduced to CSS rules that depend on a "root" CSS class (such as d1im-highcontrast). Enabling the user to switch between themes is then just a matter of switching the CSS class on the <body> tag.

     

    Regards

    Hanno

  • over 8 years ago
    Hi Hanno,

    Thanks for the response. I've already seen this page in the manual though.

    My point is, it's hard to find anything described in the documentation, the web UI, the Web Designer, the Designer configurations or the database schema which customers can enable on an ad-hoc basis.

    Some visually impaired users have unique, ad-hoc requirements. I have personal experience of a new user joining a company who couldn't use the corporate standard terminal emulator because it had a hardcoded font size and background colour.

    On that occasion, an ad-hoc solution was simple (use opensource terminal emulator with a custom configuration file). It was simple for the helpdesk to support, and it could be explained with complete ease to that user, and people in HR, without drilling into technical details. The turnaround for coming up with this ad-hoc solution for that new user was two days.

    Suppose that customer had been implementing One Identity and that new user had needed to use the portal every day as part of their job?

    If I've understood it correctly, there'd have to be a bespoke portal customization project that might take several weeks to build and QA, then it'd have to go through change control...

    For a very large customer, I can see the value in a bespoke in-house customization project that totally enables configurable themes and skins, but most of the time that level of effort would be like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.

    So it'd be interesting to know if other people have come up with neater, quicker solutions.
  • over 8 years ago
    Hi Tim,

    Not sure if I got the point across clearly. What I have seen in projects is roughly the following:

    - Add an additional flag on the employee record to express that "this user has advanced accessibility requirements".
    - Make this flag opt-in for the user (or editable by helpdesk)
    - Using the configuration script described in the manual, configure the system to activate the high-accessibility CSS based on this flag for a user.
    - ... and if there is any special CSS based on unique requirements, add it in WebDesigner.

    Done. This does not take weeks.

    The user would then see the highly-accessible web portal by default - without dealing with any technical details.

    Hanno
  • over 8 years ago
    Thanks! That does sound like an effective workaround.
  • over 8 years ago
    PS: I also would like to hear about implementations for high-accessibility requirements.