Best Practices for Accessibility

When using Process Director, you should make end user accessibility a priority. Not only is it a nice thing to do in general, but most governments mandate some form of accessibility be implemented so that disabled persons can access web-based content more easily. In the US, this mandate comes from Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act, while, more recently, Canada passed the Accessible Canada Act, which, along with various provincial accessibility laws, now mandates accessibility for all federal public institutions, Crown Corporations, and all federally regulated organizations. Fortunately, most accessibility laws specify conformance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) promulgated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

In this document., we will examine the WCAG accessibility standards, and discuss some guidance for implementing these standards within Process Director. Process Director provides accessibility tools for the creation of objects that will be accessed by end users—which primarily means Forms—and not for the administrative functions of the product itself. In order to organize these various practices, we will take a look at each of the WCAG standards, and describe the built in accessibility features of Process Director, along with some best practices for implementing each standard.

More detailed information about Process Director's compliance with accessibility standards is provided by the BP Logix Process Director Accessibility Conformance Report (VPAT© Version 2.3) as a PDF download.

Note Many accessibility features are built in to the product already, and govern specific control behaviors. These control behaviors can be reviewed in this downloadable PDF document.

Checking for Accessibility #

There are a number of tools you can use to check for accessibility while designing your Process Director forms, but one of the easiest methods for running accessibility checks is to use a browser extension (or "add-on" for Microsoft browsers). Browser extensions are installed into the web browser, and run inside the browser without needing any other external software, so they are fairly easy to use.

Keep a couple of things in mind:

  • We can't specifically recommend any third-party tool, or browser extension, only inform you about some of the available options.
  • None of these browser extensions are perfect, and all of them have their own strengths and weaknesses.
  • You should choose the accessibility checking tool that best meets your needs, after an appropriate evaluation.

With the above in mind, here are some browser extensions that are used fairly widely.

Lighthouse: This isn't actually an extension, but one of the Developer Tools that are already built into Chrome and Chrome-based browsers like Brave. It can perform a variety of checks, one of which is an accessibility check. In Chrome-based browsers, the Developer Tools can be accessed by pressing the [F12] key. Lighthouse has its own tab in the Developer Tools UI.

WAVE Accessibility Extension: Available for both Chrome and Firefox. This is one of the oldest and most widely-used browser extensions.

axe - Web Accessibility Testing: Available for Chrome, Firefox and Edge.

Accessibility Insights for Web: Available for both Chrome and Edge.

a11yTools - Web Accessibility: Available for Safari. Safari has a more limited choice of extensions, unfortunately.

IBM Equal Access Accessibility Checker: Available for Chrome and Firefox.

As mentioned previously, each of these tools have pros and cons to their use, and some experts recommend using more than one tool to check for accessibility issues.

Accessibility Principles

Please continue to see the Accessibility Principles that apply to no code/low code application development with Process Director.