Accessibility

   PlatformApplicable to all products in Temenos Journey Manager.  |   All Personas

AccessibilityWeb accessibility, or eAccessibility, is the inclusive practice of ensuring there are no barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to, websites on the World Wide Web by people with physical disabilities, situational disabilities, and socio-economic restrictions on bandwidth and speed. is the degree to which a product or a service is usable by people with the widest range of capabilities. Although, often focused on disabled people using assistive technologiesAssistive Technology is an umbrella term that includes assistive, adaptive, and rehabilitative devices for people with disabilities while also including the process used in selecting, locating, and using them., such as screen-readers, this is relevant to all people. Thus, the range of capabilities can also include product customers:

• Using slow broadband
• Using non-mainstream operating systems
• Using a mobile device
• Speaking non-native languages
• Elderly

It's important to remember that accessibility is the right thing to do. Also, providing accessible forms could be part of the law in some countries. Since 1999, the primary international standard for website accessibility has been the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) developed by the W3C. This has formed the basis for accessibility legislation around the world, including:

• Section 508 in the US
• The 2000 Government Online Strategy in Australia
• The UNCRPD signed by all EU member states

For more information, see What is accessibility.

To create an accessible form, you need to understand how assistive technologies interpret the content of the forms, so we recommend reading A (very) brief guide to accessibility.

Accessibility Criteria

There is a lot to consider when it comes to web accessibility. However, the main recommendations for creating a form with well-designed accessibility features can be summarized as follows:

• Use the correct (semantic) HTML elements for their intended purpose as much as possible. For more information, see HTML text fundamentals
• Keep content clear and concise. It should make logical sense as much as possible
• Create a clear attractive page layout using correct markup
• Make link text meaningful and don't add too many links on one page
• Provide informative, unique page titles
• Use headings to convey meaning and structure
• Write informative alternative text for images
• Add semantics to HTML elements that don't have default semantics and roles by default. For more information, see WAI-ARIA documentation
• Create transcripts and captions for multimedia
• Select correct colors and contrast. For more information, see Contrast checker
• Don't overuse CSS styles and JavaScript. Avoid masking an HTML element to look like or behave like it is not. For example, don't style <div> to look like <button>.
• Provide keyboard shortcuts as much as possible

This list covers almost all areas of form application development, so we recommend thinking about accessibility from early design stages and constantly implementing and improving it as your form application takes shape.

Keep in mind that your application will be used on mobile devices as well, so you may need to spend additional efforts to ensure it all works as there are some exceptions that need special consideration for mobile. For more information, see Accessibility on mobile devices.

This is out of scope of this documentation to guide you through all aspects of accessibility implementation, so we only concentrate on how to use our products' features to implement accessibility in forms.

Every product of the Temenos Journey Manager platform is designed with accessibility in mind, nevertheless Template Designers and Form Builders need to apply some specific configurations or code modifications to improve accessibility of form applications. The most popular tools to build forms are the Maestro editor and Springboard Solutions, so we will look at them in more details.

Maestro Forms

When you build application forms in the Maestro editor, it enables you to use templates, shared libraries and common Maestro configurations - all of which has accessibility features - some are pre-configured and some are adjustable. Furthermore, each component you use in a form may have some accessibility configurations, which provides you with even more control over what you can configure.

For more information, see Maestro form accessibility as well as particular accessibility features of each component.

Springboard Applications

You can build application forms using Springboard Solutions, which also allows you use accessibility features via component configuration.

Documentation

All our products and solutions are complex and therefore require rather deep understanding of concepts, technologies and various techniques used to implement them. To enable you to get onboard with that and start develop your own applications, we strive to create and maintain up-to-date technical documentation, including API documentation. As we do so, the documentation is written and styled with accessibility in mind.

If you are a developer who needs to document your new application functionality, API or integration interface, we recommend following the main accessibility criteria as you write your documentation.

Next, learn about Maestro form accessibility.