I WebCenter Portal Accessibility Features

This appendix describes the accessibility features of WebCenter Portal.

This appendix contains the following topic:

I.1 Overview of WebCenter Accessibility Features

Accessibility involves making your application usable by persons with disabilities such as low vision or blindness, deafness, or other physical limitations. In the simplest of terms, this means creating applications that can be used without a mouse (keyboard only), used with a screen reader for blind or low-vision users, and used without reliance on sound, color, or animation and timing.

Oracle software implements the standards of Section 508 and WCAG 1.0 AA using an interpretation of the standards at http://www.oracle.com/accessibility/standards.html.

This section describes accessibility features that are specific to WebCenter Portal. For general information about creating accessible ADF Faces pages, see the "Specifying Component-Level Accessibility Properties" section in Web User Interface Developer's Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework. For information about accessibility features in JDeveloper, see the help topics available by selecting the JDeveloper Accessibility node under JDeveloper Basics in the online help table of contents.

I.1.1 Generating Accessible HTML

WebCenter Portal provides several Composer components that you can add to your application pages to make them editable at runtime. These components provide attributes that are used to generate accessible HTML. To ensure that the pages you create are accessible, you must set these attributes, listed in Table I-1.

Table I-1 Accessibility Attributes for WebCenter Portal's Composer Components

Component Accessibility Attributes

pe:changeModeButton

No accessibility attributes.

pe:changeModeLink

No accessibility attributes.

pe:imageLink

shortDesc—Mandatory. This attribute transforms into an HTML alt attribute.

accessKey—Optional. This attribute sets the mnemonic character used to gain quick access to the component.

pe:pageCustomizable

No accessibility attributes

pe:layoutCustomizable

shortDesc—Mandatory. This attribute transforms into an HTML alt attribute.

accessKey—Optional. This attribute sets the mnemonic character used to gain quick access to the component.

cust:panelCustomizable

No accessibility attributes

cust:showDetailFrame

shortDesc—Mandatory. This attribute transforms into an HTML alt attribute.

I.1.2 Accessibility Features at Runtime

When you enable users to customize a page at runtime, you must ensure that any customizations are also accessible to all users. For all components that users can create at runtime, all accessibility-related attributes are shown in the Property Inspector where users can set them appropriately.

For a list of accessibility-related attributes for WebCenter Portal-specific components, see Table I-1. For a list of accessibility-related attributes for other components, see the "Specifying Component-Level Accessibility Properties" section in Web User Interface Developer's Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework.

I.1.3 Accessibility Considerations for Portlets

IFrames are not very well accommodated by today's screen readers and so are not permitted by some accessibility standards.

Note:

Portlets created using the Oracle JSF Portlet Bridge have the requireIFrame container runtime option set to true as these portlets are too complex to render directly on Oracle ADF pages due to JavaScript issues.

WebCenter Portal provides an optional attribute in the adf:portlet tag called renderPortletInIFrame. You can set this attribute to false to avoid ever using IFrames. For detailed information, see Section 63.5.4, "What You May Need to Know About Inline Frames."