[Athen] Accessibility of SAP Web Dynpro Apps?

[Al Puzzuoli]

Curious as to experiences others have had as regards accessibility of SAP NetWeaver and related ABAP Web Dynpro apps? Our university recently migrated all its core business applications to this architecture.  Thus far, our findings in terms of accessibility have been iffy at best. Many pages sport a bunch of clutter. Jaws detects frames and buttons that our developers didn't put there, can't see, and can't explain. When a developer asks the toolkit for a heading level, they get a visually bolded heading, but apparently no HTML markup a screen reader can actually see as a heading. If they ask for a button, they get something that looks like a button but is really a link. Radio buttons and check boxes do weird things, there are odd graphics associated with them that have nonsensical labels. There are date pickers that Jaws can't even see unless the virtual cursor is turned off, and even then, they are barely usable.
We've looked at forms designed out of the box by SAP that exhibit the same issues. Are there things our devs should be aware of that would help them in the design of more accessible Web Dynpro pages? The problem is that we are a large campus, and there are likely hundreds of developers working on numerous  projects at any given time. I'm not sure how to go about helping them all.

I really believe though that this is a systemic issue . If a developer designs a page, adds the appropriate headers and buttons, the  underlying software should be doing a better job of insuring that the code it generates is accessible.
Is anyone else seeing similar issues?
Thanks,

Al Puzzuoli
Michigan State University
Information Technologist                                       http://www.rcpd.msu.edu
Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities  517-884-1915 120 Bessey Hall East Lansing, MI  48824-1033














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