Gaining Ground on ORCID’s Accessibility

On 16 May, which is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), ORCID hosted an iD & Me webinar on our accessibility initiatives with Senior UX Designer Dan Dineen. In the webinar, Dineen highlighted ORCID’s journey towards accessibility, including the process of identifying areas in need of improvement, the work that has been done thus far, and our ongoing commitment to making ORCID accessible to all. If you missed it, you can catch the replay and download the presentation.

ORCID’s vision for a more accessible Registry

Accessibility aligns with ORCID’s vision of a world where all who participate in research, scholarship, and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions across disciplines, borders, and time. Additionally, accessibility also aligns with one of our core values, inclusivity, as well as our second founding principle of transcending discipline, geographic, national, and institutional boundaries.

One of our core strategic objectives through 2025, and likely beyond, is increasing global participation, which is not limited to overcoming geographical boundaries. “Global participation is far more than just geography,” said Dineen who has spearheaded ORCID’s accessibility improvements. “It’s about participation in all manner.”

In short, Dineen said that ORCID believes that ORCID should be open and accessible to all in order to serve the global community and move toward our vision. “We should be working toward making ORCID accessible to anyone, regardless of their ability, their status, their location, or the way that they access ORCID,” he said.

ORCID’s accessibility audits

According to the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), for an online technology to be accessible, it must be, “designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them.” To align with this initiative, an accessibility audit in 2022 served as a catalyst for ORCID to begin the ongoing work of making significant accessibility improvements within the ORCID Registry using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) accessibility standard 2.1 guidelines.

After engaging the Digital Accessibility Centre in Wales, UK, for the audit, we learned that we had 67 accessibility issues across our eight key journeys that we asked DAC to focus on:

• View/navigate a public record
• Register a new ORCID account
• Add some personal info (Biography)
• Add an employment affiliation
• Manually add a work
• Use Search & Link
• Navigate an established private record
• Sign in / Sign out

To prioritize a plan of action, we focused on making accessibility improvements to the ORCID record, for both Public and Private views. We set out to improve accessibility by:

• Restructuring ORCID records to ensure more logical structure and flow.
• Redesigning the key forms in the Registry to be coherent, and accessible.
• Overhauled the visibility widget and selection process to make sure changes of state were proactively communicated to users.
• Optimizing our QA testing with automated accessibility tools .
• Last, we worked with the Comms team to develop an accessible ORCID brand color palette.

In early 2023, we conducted an internal assessment to make sure that we were on track. Our review showed that we’d fixed more than half of the 67 issues listed in the first audit report. We resolved a vast majority of Level A and AA issues, specced out the remaining issues and added them to the backlog pending further investigation. While the numbers seemed to suggest the work we had done to improve the ORCID record was a quantifiable success we still couldn’t be certain that the changes we had made were enough. Meeting the WCAG criteria point-for-point doesn’t always translate directly into an accessible user experience. We needed DACs insight once again.

Our second audit was intended to be validation of the work we had done to remediate the issues raised in the first audit. Although we’d learned loads, some issues still remained. Results showed 88 issues across four categories in the WCAG 2.2 guidelines, which was released in late 2023. Even though some rules and criteria changed between 2.1 and 2.2, fortunately, we had anticipated this and planned our issue comparisons and prioritization accordingly. Again, we set out to work prioritizing these categories to continue moving forward in our work.

Our progress so far shows that the registration and sign-in processes are much improved
and have made good progress with 3rd party widgets that we had added since the first audit. We will link to existing work in the outstanding accessibility tasks in the backlog so they are done organically as part of ongoing feature development.

What’s next for ORCID’s accessibility improvements?

Accessibility improvements to the ORCID Registry represent a work in progress after many hours of assessing, prioritizing, and executing on our plan of action. Our backlog of accessibility improvements will include small improvements, tweaks, tidy-ups and fixes, as well as a handful of larger tasks, including:

• Visible focus styles: Finding a way to clearly and consistently show the user what they are currently interacting with
• Timeouts: Warn idle users before we automatically sign them out of the Registry and give them a chance to cancel the timeout before it happens
• The ORCID homepage: Long due for an overhaul, we expect our new home page to be published soon, and we’ve ensured it will be as accessible as possible.

Learn more about ORCID’s commitments to accessibility in our Accessibility Statement. For additional reading on our blog about the process and planning for our accessibility improvements, read All About Accessibility: How We’re Working to Make ORCID an Inclusive Experience for Researchers.