RFC data visualizations accessibility review

To truly include as many people as we can, the IETF community has consistently tried to uphold accessibility standards for the publication of RFCs. For example, in 2016 when we published RFC 7992 describing the current HTML publication format, the community specified some accessibility requirements. RFC 7996 describes the SVGs allowed in RFCs, and it too includes accessibility considerations. These RFC authors and the teams that have implemented the tools we use for publishing documents have put great effort towards trying to understand and meet the needs of all readers.

So in support of the community’s goals for accessibility, the IETF Administration LLC and RFC Series Consulting Editor undertook a project to evaluate RFC HTML and SVG from the perspective of people who use assistive technology, such as screen readers. We hired Prime Access Consulting (PAC), a specialist accessibility consultancy, to take a look, and we’d like to share some of their top level findings, along with their full 37 page report.

HTML accessibility issues

• Math formulas are inaccessible
• Tables of contents have issues with positioning in the document and with revealing/hiding the information
• Instances of duplicated links, hidden links, improperly labeled links, and excessive links 
• Issues with headings, blocks of tabular data, and captions for code blocks that affect comprehension
• Older HTMLized RFCs have many accessibility concerns including:
  • Use of preformatted text for the entire document severely hampers accessibility because screen readers interpret the content of <pre> elements verbatim, presenting every space and line break
  • No structural markup that would allow keyboard navigation through the document
  • Tabular data lacks markup to make it navigable
  • Note: The text publication format does not have the <pre> problem but lacks any navigation assistance, so is not a very useful substitute

Image accessibility issues

• ASCII art is not accessible
• SVGs often do not have adequate short or long descriptions, and may benefit from pointers to either prose or structured data versions of the visual information
• Some RFCs describe the contents of images in a way that relies on the reader being able to see the image in order to comprehend the description

You can read the full report here.

Our next step is to add guidance to the authors resources site on how to make data visualizations in I-Ds and RFCs as accessible as possible.

This project has identified several ways we could update our publication formats and requirements in order to make access to RFCs more equitable. We will continue to pursue improvements in this area, and if you are interested in these issues we invite you to join the RFC Series Working Group (RSWG).