accessibility

Application accessibility statement in line with Public Sector Body (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018

This accessibility statement applies to the Noteable service described at (https://noteable.edina.ac.uk). Parallel statements are available for the website, moodle, and StatusPage.

This application is run by EDINA, for the University of Edinburgh. Our aim is for as many people as possible to be able to use this service. That means you should be able to:

Customising the application

AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability. This is an external site with suggestions to make your computer more accessible:

AbilityNet - My Computer My Way

With a few simple steps you can customise the appearance of our website using your browser settings to make it easier to read and navigate:

Additional information on how to customise our website appearance

How accessible this application is

We know some parts of this application are not fully accessible:

Feedback and contact information

If you need information on this website or the Noteable service in a different format such as an accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille:

We will consider your request and get back to you within 5 working days.

Reporting accessibility problems with this application

We are always looking to improve the accessibility of the Noteable service. If you find any problems not listed on this page, or think we're not meeting accessibility requirements:

We will consider your report and get back to you within 5 working days.

Enforcement procedure

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is responsible for enforcing the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 (the 'accessibility regulations'). If you're not happy with how we respond to your complaint please contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS) directly.

Contact details for the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS)

The UK government has also produced information on how to report accessibility issues: Reporting an accessibility problem on a public sector website.

Contacting us by phone using British Sign Language

Contact SCOTLAND BSL runs a service for British Sign Language users and all of Scotland's public bodies using video relay. This enables sign language users to contact public bodies and vice versa. The service operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Technical information about this application's accessibility

EDINA is committed to making its Noteable service accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

Compliance status

This application is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA standard, owing to the non-compliances listed below.

Non accessible content

The service is based on the Jupyter Notebook, and Notebooks are known to be complex web-applications.

Jupyter Notebook and Jupyter Lab applications

Project Jupyter has an over-arching accessibility working group which meets every 2 weeks.

The links to named issues are:

Notebook Documents have specific keyboard controls for the application, so the application does not fail 2.1.1 - Keyboard. There is a cheat-sheet for keyboard controls downloadable via data science cheat sheets.

Notebook Document code cells have specific keyboard controls within code-cells. There is a cheat-sheet for keyboard controls downloadable via DefKey.

RStudio

The RStudio interface interface uses an OpenSource application from RStudio. The company has no explicit Accessibility documentation for their product, however the following articles are reference material:

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

The following items to not comply with the WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria -

Classic Notebook

Jupyterlab Notebook

RStudio Notebook

Disproportionate burden

We are not currently claiming that any accessibility problems would be a disproportionate burden to fix.

Content that's not within the scope of the accessibility regulations

We specifically exclude user-generated content, such as code run in Notebook Documents, from the scope of this report. For example, the addition of descriptions for graphs requires the user to include that in their code.

What we're doing to improve accessibility

The Noteable service team will work with the suppliers to address the accessibility issues. Unless specified otherwise, a complete solution or significant improvement will be in place for those items within our control by December 2023.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

The original statement was prepared on 20th October 2021. It was split into separate documents, and last reviewed on 2nd November 2022.

Testing

This service was last tested by the Noteable Service team within the Information Services Group directorate. The testing was carried out primarily using a combination of Firefox & Google Chrome browsers on a Linux system; with MacOS (and Safari) and Windows 10 (and Microsoft Edge) also used for comparative purposes, including screen reader compatibility. Lynx was used to test text-only navigation for the main website (but not the notebooks). In particular, the service was tested using Chrome on multiple platforms since it is by far the most popular browser when using a screen reader and the most popular browser when using the Noteable service. Current worldwide usage levels for different screen readers and browsers can be found in the May-June 2021 WebAIM annual survey.

Automated testing

We try to be consistent with automated testing across all components in the Noteable service.

A representative sample of pages were chosen to cover the different types of content and presentation within the service.

We used a range of toolkits and services to check each page:

Automated testing results
Tested PageIBM Equal Access Accessibility CheckerLightHouse AccessibilityLightHouse Best Practice
Classic notebook tree page85%91%92%
Classic notebook document88%82%83%
Classic notebook assignment list89%91%92%
Classic notebook formgrader74%90%92%
Jupyterlab Interface96%86%100%
Jupyterlab Interface
(with notebook document open)
89%76%100%
RStudio Interface(could not run test)87%100%

We recognise the limitations of automated testing and we supplemented this with manual testing.

Manual Testing

Basic manual testing is viewing each page in a variety of browser/Operating System.

Content across the Noteable service has been tested without a mouse through keyboard navigation and has been found to be accessible using a keyboard interface. Note that the Jupyter and RStudio applications generally "tab" to navigate between sections, and "arrow key" within menus.

Using Windows 10 [Home Edition], We

Using MacOS X [Big Sur], we

Using Linux [Ubuntu 20:04 LTS], we visually compared all pages using Firefox and Chrome.

We also tested for the following:

Our findings on these features are summarised above.