As a user centric collaboration experience platform, eXo Platform is committed to provide an inclusive and accessible software for everyone, regardless of their abilities, disabilities and the severity of the latter.
A dedicated team has been designated to assess accessibility scores and seek third party audits. The team is an active part of the making of eXo Platform, and continuously recommends changes to provide an accessible user experience.
Additionally, eXo Platform strives to suport customers in reaching their accessibility targets, in particular regarding compliance with the latest accessibility standards and guidelines.
- Standards and guidelines:
As a web-centric solution, eXo Platform seeks to comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) , which represents a set of guidelines and recommendations to help make web content accessible for people with disabilities.
Being partially or fully compliant with WCAG 2.1 or earlier versions guarantees better accessibility, usability and an enhanced user experience for all end users.
- Approach and status:
The initial focus has been placed on assessing accessibility of the overall navigation and of key content-oriented pages and applications within eXo Platform. The aim is to allow all users to easily locate, access and consume various types of information within the activity stream or collaborative spaces such as news articles, wikis, chat messages and documents.
To guarantee a smooth and effective process, a permanent team has been trained to the latest requirements and best practices and tasked to drive accessibility programs. It’s a multidisciplinary team composed of software engineers, analysts, designers and testers that is therefore able to get the full picture and empowered to alter processes at all stages : tooling, design, dev guidelines, and so on. They also work in assisting eXo clients with accessibility projects and gathering feedback from end users.
Although eXo Platform is continuously working to be more compliant with the existing accessibility standards, there is more benefit in actively working on continuous improvement rather than seeking irealistic compliance scores that would result in overwhelming user experience. That’s why, as a software vendor, we take our part in designing accesible features and helping our customers achieving their own audits.
- Roadmap:
Going forward, the objective is to periodically assess the accessibility score of eXo Platform’s main existing applications and perform the right adjustments to achieve higher scores.
To achieve accessibility by design, feature teams plan to include people with disabilities as design personas and conduct usability tests with participants with disabilities and impairments.
Additionally, a digital workplace is a very large user experience that revolves around a variety of pillars such as communication, collaboration, content management and knolwedge sharing. As a result, the plan is to widen the accessbility coverage to more collaborative and interactive workflows already available in the product as well as more usage scenarios, for example content authoring thanks to ATAG guidelines.
- Feedback:
To help pinpoint accessibility limitations and work on potential improvements, eXo Platform users are welcome to leave their comments and suggestions via the website or the open community “eXo Tribe”.