Carousels are a popular website feature because they allow one to fit extra information within the same footprint and provide visual interest on a page. But as you most likely know, there is wide disagreement about whether they should ever be used. Reasons include: they can be annoying, no one spends long enough on a page to ever see beyond the first item, people rarely click on them (even if they read the information) and they add bloat to pages (Michael Schofield has a very compelling set of slides on this topic). But by far the most compelling argument against them is that they are difficult if not impossible to make accessible, and accessibility issues exist for all types of users.
In reality, however, it’s not always possible to avoid carousels or other features that may be less than ideal. We all work within frameworks, both technical and political, and we need to figure out how to create the best case scenario within those frameworks. If you work in a university or college library, you may be constrained by a particular CMS you need to use, a particular set of brand requirements, and historical design choices that may be slower to go away in academia than elsewhere. This post is a description of how I made some small improvements to my library website’s carousel to increase accessibility, but I hope it can serve as a larger discussion of how we can always make small improvements within whatever frameworks we work.
What Makes an Accessible Carousel?
We’ve covered accessibility extensively on ACRL TechConnect before. Cynthia Ng wrote a three part series in 2013 on making your website accessible, and Lauren Magnuson wrote about accessibility testing LibGuides in 2015. I am not an expect by any means on web accessibility, and I encourage you to do additional research about the basics of accessibility. For this specific project I needed to understand what it is specifically about carousels that makes them particular inaccessible, and how to ameliorate that. When I was researching this specific project, I found the following resources the most helpful.
The basic issues with carousels are that they move at their own pace but in a way that may be difficult to predict, and are an inherently visual medium. For people with visual impairments the slideshow images are irrelevant unless they provide useful information, and their presence on the page causes difficulty for screen reading software. For people with motor or cognitive impairments (which covers nearly everyone at some point in their lives) a constantly shifting image may be distracting and even if the content is interesting it may not be possible to click on the image at the rate it is set to move.
You can increase accessibility of carousels by making it obvious and easy for users to stop the slideshow and view images at their own pace, make the role of the slideshow and the controls on the page obvious to screen reading software, to make it possible to control the slideshow without a mouse, and to make it still work without stylesheets. Alternative methods of accessing the content have to be available and useful.
I chose to work on the slideshow as part of a retheming of the library website to bring it up to current university branding standards and to make it responsive. The current slideshow lacked obvious controls or any instructions for screen readers, and was not possible to control without a mouse. My general plan in approaching this was to ensure that there were obvious controls to control the slideshow (and that it would pause quickly without a lot of work), have ARIA roles for screen readers, and be keyboard controllable. I had to work with the additional constraints of making this something that would work in Drupal, be responsive, and that would allow the marketing committee to post their own images without my intervention but would still require alt tags and other crucial items for accessibility.
My Approach
Because the library’s website uses Drupal, it made sense to look for a solution that was designed to work with Drupal. Many options exist, and everyone has a favorite or a more appropriate choice for a particular situation, so if you are looking for a good Drupal solution you’ll want to do your own research. I ended up choosing a Drupal module called Views Slideshow after looking at several options. It seemed to be customizable enough that I was pretty sure I could make it accessible even though it lacked some of the features out of the box. The important thing to me is that it would make it possible to give the keys to the slideshow operation to someone else. The way our slideshow traditionally worked required writing HTML into the middle of a hardcoded homepage and uploading the image to the server in a separate process. This meant that my department was a roadblock to updating the images, and required careful coordination before vacations or times away to ensure we could get the images changed. We all agreed that if the slideshow was going to stay, this process had to improve.
Why not just remove the slideshow entirely? That’s one option we definitely considered, but one important caveat I set early in the redesign process was to leave the site content and features alone and just update the look and feel of the site. Thus I wanted to leave every current piece of information that was an important part of the homepage as is, though slightly reorganized. I also didn’t want to change the size of the homepage slideshow images, since the PR committee already had a large stock of images they were using and I didn’t want them to have to redesign everything. In general, we are moving to a much more flexible and iterative process for changing website features and content, so nothing is ruled out for the future.
I won’t go into a lot of detail about the technical fixes I made, since this won’t be widely applicable. Views Slideshow uses a very standard Drupal module called Views to create a list of content. While it is a very popular module, I found it challenging to install correctly without a lot of help (I mainly used this site), since the settings are hard to figure out. In setting up the module, you are able to control things like whether alt text is required, the most basic type of accessibility feature, which allows users who cannot see images to understand their content through screen readers or other assistive technologies. Beyond that, you can set some things up in the templates for the modules. First I created a Drupal content type is called Featured Slideshow. It includes fields for title of the slide, image, and the link it should go to. The image has an alt and title field, which can be set automatically using tokens (text templates), or manually by the person entering data. The module uses jQuery Cycle to control which image is available. I then customized the templates (several PHP files) to include ARIA roles and to edit the controls to make them plain English rather than icons (I can think of downsides to this approach for sure, but at least it makes the point of them clear for many people).
ARIA role. This is frequently updated but non-essential page content. Its default ARIA live state is “off”, meaning unless the user is focused on it changes in state won’t be announced. You can change this to “polite” as well, which means a change in state will be announced at the next convenient opportunity. You would never want to use “assertive”, since that would interrupt the user for no reason.
Features I’m still working on are detailed in The Unbearable Inaccessibility of Slideshows, specifically keyboard focus order and improved performance with stylesheets unavailable. However with a few small changes I’ve improved accessibility of a feature on the site–and this technique can be applied to any feature on any site.
Making Small Improvements to Improve Accessibility.
While librarians who get the privilege of working on their own library’s website have the possibilities to guide the design choices, we are not always able to create exactly the ideal situation. Whether you are dealing with a carousel or any other feature that requires some work to improve accessibility, I would suggest the following strategy:
- Review what the basic requirements are for making the feature work with your platform and situation. This means both technically and politically.
- Research the approaches others have taken. You probably won’t be able to use someone else’s technique unless they are in a very similar situation, but you can at least use lessons learned.
- Create a step by step plan to ensure you’re not missing anything, as well as a list of questions to answer as you are working through the development process.
- Test the feature. You can use achecker or WAVE, which has a browser plugin to help you test sites in a local development environment.
- Review errors and fix these. If you can’t fix everything, list the problems and plan for future development, or see if you can pick a new solution.
- Test with actual users.
This may seem overwhelming, but taking it slow and only working on one feature at a time can be a good way to manage the process. And even better, you’ll improve your practices so that the next time you start a project you can do it correctly from the beginning.