Eclipse BIRT and Accessibility

Question

I work for a large financial institution and all our web sites need to be accessible for people with disabilities. We are using Eclipse BIRT to generate some reports and I want to explore if anyone out there has any experience in making the reports accessible. The main problem is that there is a lot of data in the report and some of it may not be understandable by the value alone, for instance a string like "123444" may be an account number, a check number or a transaction id. In a pure HTML page we will either use a dl / dt / dd construct to make it clear the purpose of the date, or we use ARIA attributes like aria-labelledby .

Another area of concern is the creation of accessible PDF files.

Any help or report on experience will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Given your description I presume that you are focusing on blind users. One of the most popular screen readers for English language use is JAWS by Freedom Scientific There is a free trial version which you can download for testing and/or your organization can purchase a copy.

You can read your report with JAWS and find what issues need to be addressed. Proper labeling conventions for buttons and such is probably the most overlooked by developers. (ie Button123 with Image1A is the submit button, JAWS can't read the picture of words in the image, soo...)

Speaking from experience ( I am closely associated with a blind computer user ) stay away from PDF if you want it to be blind friendly. Web pages and text documents are much more blind friendly.

PDF works to create a version of a document that is static for visual appeal. In the process is chops up the text, when JAWS tries to read it it will read half of one item, then half of another, than maybe jump back to finish the last 1/3 of the first, leaving the middle 1/6 for last, it is painful. Of course a PDF that does not have text layer (ie a picture of a word document) is not readable by any screen reader.