openerp-community team mailing list archive

["Ian Beardslee" <ian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

The company (http://catalyst.net.nz) I work for has been asked to further
investigate OpenERP for the use in a manufacturing process.  That in
itself is simple until the requirement that it must be workable for a
blind user.  After a (VERY) brief search, apart from a presentation from
2012 .. http://www.slideshare.net/openobject/openerp-usability .. I
haven't found any substantial effort into accessibility.

I sat down for about an hour with our accessibility expert (yes, he's blind).

On the whole it went mostly well, but it seems there'll be a number of
things that need to be worked on to make it reliably better.  These aren't
necessarily in order of priority, inconvenience or brokenness.

* Tab ordering seems inconsistent.  As an example when building a
manufacturing order there are two columns: 'Products to Consume' and
'Products Consumed', each with a Add button under them.  ORCA reads
'Products to Consume', 'Products Consumed', 'Add', 'Add'.

* Some buttons need a bit more description .. eg 'Add New Product' instead
of just 'Add'.

* No indication to ORCA that a field is required.  For the visual people,
it has a background colour.

* A number of options were defined by a letter.  Eg the different views on
some pages for view as a List, From, Graph etc.  ORCA was able to read a
longer version as I moused over the buttons, but as we tabbed through we
were just given a single letter as an indicator.  The delete/trash icon
was also defined as the letter 'D'.

* Dialog boxes.  OpenERP uses a log of dialog boxes to add extra details
to pages, eg creating a new product from the Manufacturing Order page pops
up a new dialog box to further edit the new product.  Unfortunately the
focus doesn't seem to immediately go to that dialog box and tabbing and
using the cursor would carry on the form behind the dialog box. These
would need to be made more modal.

Some of these changes may be simple and some may be harder to deal with. I
do imagine that there will be a good chuck of work to bring OpenERP to a
point where it is solidly accessible as we'd want.

Are there any other efforts by people or teams working on accessibility
that we could work with to help improve the accessibility of OpenERP?

Cheers,
Ian