We are in the same situation, our London office do have blind users and low vision users that need to have a compliant tool to work withâŚ
SuiteR is not full compliant but workable, SuiteP is not workable (I am fully sighted and having issues with SuiteP as is) ⌠We do have many other blind users (employees) over the world.
We will stick with 7.8 until there is an accessible theme or an upgrade safe way to modify SuiteP if we absolutely need to use this one while upgrading to 7.10. This is sad because I am very excited to use a âcleanâ or renovated SuiteCRM versionâŚ
btw âaccessibleâ ⌠i.e. conforms to âDisabilities Discrimination actâ regarding vision impairementâŚ
Guys, you ARE the Community resources to fix this. Letâs get this solved.
Which of the âstylesâ (dawn, disk, etc) of the new SuiteP do you think is closest to being ok for your requirements?
Letâs start from there, and list the changes that need to be made. These new palettes are here because you (and me!) asked for them, and theyâre still in process, so letâs ask for what is still lacking, Iâm sure itâs not that complicated⌠to my eyes several of the new styles look much easier to read than the original SuiteP.
Respectfully, when I hear something like âour London officeâ, that denotes that the organization is of sufficient size to warrant heavier-duty IT support.
I âget itâ that some might be charitable organizations with limited resources and funding, but there comes a point when adequate support must be provided ⌠and that comes at a price. Some things cannot be operated on a shoe-string. There is no way around that!
Any large entity using an open source solution cannot ⌠and should not ⌠expect all their specific IT needs to be provided, gratis.
Lest we forget ⌠CRM users are many and varied and SA is a business. Businesses exist to make a profit!
Agree on the blind users and others with special needs: issues must be solved. But how?
The ones that have the needs (or have them in their business) must get involved and start the work.
It wonât happen if you donât get involved, as its too difficult to provide by the âothersâ.
7.10 will have color variations. Start with one of those and request a special variation for blinded people on github.
Make a list of what needs to be changed first
Create code proposals
Ask for approval.
There is no other way to do this!
(Note: same goes for the other users who would love a different color variation)
On the other issues: I agree, even the non-blind people ave troubles with the actual color scheme of the forum (an easy fix would solve this but they didnât accepted it yet).
This in fact shows that SalesAgility do not take issues as User interface and usability very seriously!
@paullm I have a client with two offices in different cities, but their total employee count is under 20, so please donât assume that implies a big organisation. The client that needs this to be accessible is a charity, so resources are limited. As I previously said, yes this is open source software, those of us who do not pay anything to SalesAgility canât expect anything in return. But SalesAgilities paying customers (of which I assume there are some!) do deserve (and should expect) software which is complaint with basic legislative requirements, so do this for them, not for us. If it makes the non-paying users happy as well, then that is merely a bonus! Also, having a product which shows good design and thought about these issues is good for business.
@pqr, From an aesthetic point of view I prefer âDayâ. âDarkâ is marginally better in terms of contrast but itâs marginal. To be honest, they are all equally bad, but if you want one to concentrate on go for âDayâ. It is visually closer to SuiteR, so itâs less likely to cause howls of protest simply because it represents the smallest change visually. Changing the colour palette as well highlights the fact there has been a major change and makes it more likely there will be complaints, simply because people are more likely to notice. To be honest, if you had stuck to the blue pallet with SuiteP/7.9, you might have (just) gotten away with the other changes.
In terms of what needs to be improved, just apply a simple rule, more contrast. Review all the major text groups and use a colour contrast analyser to make sure they meet WCAG guidelines. If you want a âbadâ example, open the calendar with the day theme. This is a mass of washed out pale text on a pale backgrounds. eg, the Date headers only have about one third of the necessary contrast to pass WCAG criteria. Also, when testing, please bear in mind different screens donât render colours the same, so a combination that âlooks okâ a brand new high spec monitor might be barely readable on something older. I have a WCAG colour checker extension installed on my browser to make it easy.
The second most important point is that I canât find a way to set the default sub-theme. You seem to be stuck with dawn until you go and change it in your profile. This also means that you are stuck with âdawnâ on the login page regardless, which uses pale grey text on white in the login box. Iâm guessing that I can force this by disabling the other themes in the underlying theme code, so that will probably happen.
One further thought, Iâd personally be tempted to dump the spindly all caps font used for the headings and use something compact but more chunky. On my display the browser default font used for SuiteR is more readable at smaller font sizes regardless of the contrast that that used in SuiteP. However, that might be just me, so itâs not a deal breaker.
@paullm yes, we are contributing in the following ways, 1- as any other member that share problems and solutions, 2 - by purchasing modules (outlook per example)âŚ
and no we are not a large organisation⌠2 IT guys for the whole cie.
My point about London is about our tools must respect the lawâŚ
There is an old saying⌠âthere is no free lunchââŚ
What mystifies me about that accessibility problems were highlighted in Suite 7.9. SalesAgility clearly realised that something needed to be done, otherwise they wouldnât have gone and developed the sub-themes mechanism with 4 sub-themes. Since budget clearly existed at that point to do this work, itâs a mystery to me why the spec for those themes didnât include a requirement for at least one of them to meet accessibility requirements (or at least be no worse than SuiteR). The cost difference would have been marginal, vs the business benefit of widening the appeal of SuiteCRM.
Youâve made your point, now calm down, please, thereâs no need to repeat it.
Itâs actually very easy to explain with a metaphor: vision problems. Different people see different things, right?
I look at the SuiteP screens and I see sharp, defined text that I can read. You donât, and many people donât.
But thatâs like whatâs happening also in the software development decisions: you see sharp, defined requirements for accessibility, where other people have no idea what youâre talking about. It is not obvious to me or to other developers and designers that the current four options for colours are (all of them) terrible to read. I look at those colours, but I donât see what you see. I donât see lack of contrast, because itâs not a problem for my eyes.
So just show some respect for this particular kind of blindness: not seeing accessibility requirements so evidently as you.
You and bmwtourer are the closest thing that SalesAgility has to having accessibility experts to consult with. So: youâve made your accessiblity reports, theyâve been noted, now letâs try to work that into the development plan. Resources are limited, of course. But we are still in Beta and this doesnât havenât to be too difficult, so Iâm optimistic.
@bmwtourer ⌠I think your response above was actually to horus68âs comments.
@tim1mw ⌠I would argue that an employee count of âunder 20â is still a reasonably-sized organization and if you are going to employ open-sourced, web-based software, you will do yourself a big favour by having at least one person with some basic knowledge of CSS, HTML, etc. So much of CSS is just setting/changing parameters in a configuration file (i.e. style.css).
The problems you have highlighted are obviously not problems to most SuiteCRM users. Iâm not discounting the special requirements of your particular users, but with some quite basic CSS understanding, your problems are actually quite easy to fix.
I completely agree that the names of the colours do not use meaning-full names. They are not meant to be meaning-full names. Some of the feedback we received, was that you needed to change a colour in multiple locations. So I moved them into a style-sheet. This enables theme creators to use a colour picker in the browser to find the colour value in the colour palette stylesheet. So they can change all the areas which use that colour.
Itâs not a perfect system. It is a work in progress. I would be interested in what you would call the colours in the palette. I am thinking of create two sets for each colour, eg $bg-color-n and a $fg-color-n. fg would control icon color, textual items. bg would control the background of buttons, and other areas which are blocked out.
Itâs also worth mentioning that the variables style sheet is where the âgoodâ variable names exist. They are grouped by the area of the CRM they effect. The sass files will enable us to generate styles more effectively.
Iâm not an expert, but I would create 2 designs.
Design 1 - would be AAA compliant (even if not that pretty!). That would also require bigger fonts.
Design 2 - would be AA compliant (safe but more prettier!).
This would bring SuiteCRM ok regarding WCAG ACCESSIBLE COLORS.
====== As for screen-readers
this is not my area but maybe start here and find some :
Screen Readers and CSS: Are We Going Out of Style (and into Content)? https://webaim.org/blog/screen-readers-and-css/
======= Webmaster challenge
Please see a statement list that every site should be able to place in their âaccessibility info pageâ regarding:
Standards compliance / Structural Markup / Images / Links / Forms / Scripts / Visual design https://www.ahead.org/accessibility
Anyone can go open up a new issue. Iâm not seeing anything about WCAG spec at all.
Everyone knows this is a free open source project. If you have a problem with something not working at least help ease the leg work by suggesting what needs to be changed in a clear concise manner. You donât have to implement the change if you donât know how; but a clean issue with a check list of places that need to be changed with screenshots showing why would go a long way for someone else to come along and make the quick color change to one of the existing themes.
I totally agree with you! Iâm not an expert on Web Accessibility. I already work too many hours for SuiteCRM community but I will create the Git issue.
Notes:
Iâm not expecting that SuiteCRM will ever be âA levelâ compliant WCAG 2.0 (some specs are truly difficult to achieve.
But for color contrast the âAAAâ levels easy to achieve!
So my previous comments here was only to avoid those who question color contrast on SuiteCRM.
As now there will be styles implemented, then SalesAgility should have one fo AAA contrast color. That would end those questions!
@Oddl make sure you are logged in to the forums, and then you will easily find an unsubscribe button at the top of the thread, and another one at the bottom. Sorry this one went off-topic⌠or maybe not completely off-topic, but very busy on a particular front that doesnât concern everybody!
