Making Truenas products screen reader friendly?

[nktech1135]

Hi.

First of all an introduction. As people may guess from the thread title i'm blind and use screen reader technology to operate my computer. I'm currently using the nvda screen reader as my primary means of accessing and controlling my computer. I work in IT for a small software services company.
We are looking at truenas products to potentially provide us with a backup solution for our various servers and virtual machines. In researching these products, primarily truenas core, and the recently developing truenas scale i'm coming across one common thread that bugs me. In the design of the UI it doesn't seem like anyone has even really considered the accessibility side of things for screen reader users or other impaired groups.
The reason i say this is the lack of consistancy in how usable/accessible the interface is between truenas scale and core. for example, Some bugs that are in one interface aren't in the other. I'm wondering if there is any way to get this fixed? I'm not a developer so can't do it myself but i would love to work with a developer who can fix things to point out where the issues are. I'm primarily interested in scale at this point as the software stack fits us better than core and it's a still developing product, although if some of the fixes could find there way back to core that would be fantastic.

Anyone want to take on this challenge?

Thanks.

 

[Kris Moore]

@nktech1135 - Thanks for letting us know! The interface is SCALE is the "new" one, which we plan to make standard across the board in the coming future. If you are finding specific bugs there that make it not usable, please by all means file a ticket on jira.ixsystems.com so we can investigate. At the moment we don't have a real setup here to test screen-reader support, so anybody who can help in that effort would be appreciated.

 

[nktech1135]

@nktech1135 - Thanks for letting us know! The interface is SCALE is the "new" one, which we plan to make standard across the board in the coming future. If you are finding specific bugs there that make it not usable, please by all means file a ticket on jira.ixsystems.com so we can investigate. At the moment we don't have a real setup here to test screen-reader support, so anybody who can help in that effort would be appreciated.

Hi.
Thanks for the support on this. I'll file bugs as i come across them.

 

[Arwen]

@nktech1135 - One thing that may help, is the CLI. This is a new command line interface to TrueNAS SCALE. It is under development, so not all items would be present until later. Note that this CLI, while run from either a shell window or GUI terminal window, is not a Shell command line interpreter. You would be able to configure your NAS from CLI, and have the configuration saved. Meaning the config would also be available via the GUI, (unlike raw OS shell commands).

At present, I don't know if straight forward statistics, like pool space used, dataset space used, would be available from the CLI.

iXsystems has also said something similar will be ported to TrueNAS Core & Enterprise, after being well developed with SCALE.

 

[Newfoundland.Republic]

@Kris Moore - You may not be aware, but accessiBe has a site for testing accessibility.

---Edit---
Another one is https://wave.webaim.org

 

[nktech1135]

@nktech1135 - One thing that may help, is the CLI. This is a new command line interface to TrueNAS SCALE. It is under development, so not all items would be present until later. Note that this CLI, while run from either a shell window or GUI terminal window, is not a Shell command line interpreter. You would be able to configure your NAS from CLI, and have the configuration saved. Meaning the config would also be available via the GUI, (unlike raw OS shell commands).

At present, I don't know if straight forward statistics, like pool space used, dataset space used, would be available from the CLI.

iXsystems has also said something similar will be ported to TrueNAS Core & Enterprise, after being well developed with SCALE.

Hi.
Thanks for this. The cli was a new one to me, but seems like a long overdue feature. I'll deffinitely check into it.

 

[nktech1135]

Hi.
I think i've found my first real accessibility bug.
Go to storage and in the menu choose snapshots.
Click the show extra columns option.
Once you're showing all the columns, you should have a 3 dot menu on the right hand column. It's not possible to click this button if using a screen reader like nvda.
I'd file this as a bug, but not sure exactly what components it would be against. Can someone help?

Edit, this is on the latest version of truenas scale.

 

[Samuel Tai]

Please file the bug for webgui in Scale.

 

[nktech1135]

I started to do this but had to sign up for an account on the bugtracker first. I tried doing so and discovered i can't use the capcha on the signup page.

There is no audio option and i'm not subscribed to a capcha solving service.

 

[Samuel Tai]

I opened https://jira.ixsystems.com/browse/NAS-109779 on your behalf.

 

[nktech1135]

I opened https://jira.ixsystems.com/browse/NAS-109779 on your behalf.

Thanks a lot. In the meantime i got a friend to read the image for me and did manage to sign up. I should've done that earlier.
Is there a place to submit a bug on the inaccessibility of the signup process?

 

[Samuel Tai]

Is there a place to submit a bug on the inaccessibility of the signup process?

If there is in the iX Jira, I don't think we can access it. Try sending a PM to @Kris Moore here.

 

[blinddark]

Hello, i'm blind too and would like to test TrueNAS with the Screen Readers JAWS and NVDA. Is the Webinterface accessible for blind users? Are there settings to set to optimize it for accessibility?

Thanks a lot