The Nintex Platform and accessibility
On May 19th, we all celebrated Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which marks an important date to us at Nintex as we are making strides to make our products more accessible for everyone. We have made quite the number of improvements in regards to our accessibility efforts and wanted to provide an update on some of the progress we are making as an organization.
Since we last discussed accessibility through our post ‘Web accessibility and the Nintex Process Platform’, we’ve been hard at work creating a plan towards gaining Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA standard compliance for our products.
Our first step on this journey was to ensure all colors displayed in Nintex products passed the minimum AA contrast requirements. This work was undertaken as part of our efforts to unify the color palette across all Nintex products. The most notable change during this time was our move from using Nintex orange as a primary color throughout our products and replacing this with an accessible blue.
We then shifted focus to educating our design team on not only best practice and meeting accessibility standards, but also in understanding how assistive technologies are used within the digital realm. This allowed our design team to empathize with users and understand their perspective when tackling design problems.
Our education efforts began to expand to our Product Management and Engineering teams, where design leaders worked closely with these teams on sharing knowledge and developing an approach to tackling compliance deficiencies.
Since then, we have continued to strive to identify a manageable approach that prioritised improvements for users who would benefit from them the most. The primary users identified were the consumers of workflow processes, typically those filling in forms or completing tasks and Promapp users consuming process maps or following procedures.
Now you might be asking yourself, what’s next?
Nintex Workflow Cloud runtime forms experience
Nintex Workflow Cloud runtime forms experience will be the first Nintex product to see accessibility improvements released this month as we aim towards WCAG 2.1 AA compliance. A key focus of the first phase includes making form containers compatible with screen readers, thus ensuring language encoding is correctly inherited and that screen readers can transition into the form from the browser tab smoothly. In addition to this, improvements have been made to form submissions and we have begun the process of upgrading form controls based on their frequency of use. Albeit with a small number of controls initially, form designers can start creating fully compliant forms.
The initial accessible form controls will be short text, barcode, email, currency and number, building a momentum to roll out all other form controls in subsequent releases. Alongside these improvements, accessibility support for form level validation messages and multipage form navigation will be tackled.
Nintex Promapp Mobile
The second Nintex product to benefit from accessibility compliance will be the new Nintex Promapp mobile app. Work is currently underway to update the app to meet WCAG 2.1 AA, making this the first Nintex product to become fully accessible, allowing users to access their process maps at their convenience wherever they may be.
How you can get involved
Keep an eye out for product release notes for more specific information as the features discussed above are released.
As we move through future stages of our accessibility road map, complete this survey to share your suggestions for form control priority.
If you’re interested in participating in product research, please register your details with the Nintex User Experience team.
Interested in exploring and experiencing the Nintex Process Platform for yourself? Get in touch with the team today. Or you can try the Nintex Platform yourself with a free trial.
