accessibility of the reproducible builds page

[Valerie R Young]

Hi Sebastian, thanks for the report! I work on the
tests.reproducible-builds.org pages so I can provide some information
about the navigation. Hopefully someone else can get back to you about
the diffoscope output formatting.

On 11/13/2016 03:30 AM, Sebastian Humenda wrote:
> Hi all
>
> I'd like to report and discuss with you an issue that I'm having with the
> reproducible builds page, linked from the QA page of a package of mine.
> My package, freedict, is affected by "unstable" builds. I suppose that's because
> the build time stamp is inserted into some of the distributed files.
> Therefore I have tried  to take a look at the diff output, but found this view
> to be very inaccessible on the web site. I am using a screen reader (BRLTTY or
> gnome-orca) to read either the console or the GUI, respectively.
>
> I started at
> "https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/rb-pkg/unstable/amd64/freedict.html".
> This site is built with iframes and hence I cannot view it with w3m. 
>
> I changed to an X session and tried the same with Firefox. Although the site was
> still somewhat difficult to interpret (with a screen reader), I was able to find a link called "txt" and
> it possibly contains the build diff.
You are right, the "txt" link is the diffoscope output in text format,
instead of HTML format. I'll make the hover text more descriptive.

I'm curious about the iframe, however -- can you explain the problem a
little more? How does it make it hard for the screen reader? Can you not
view what is inside the iframe? Is there anything I could do to make it
easier for the screen reader, other than get rid of iframes entirely?
> However, the text file contains tables made of Unicode symbols and hence I
> cannot navigate them properly. The screen reader is reading every character on
> the line, from left to right, ignoring the columns in the plain text format.
> This usually works fine for plain texts or code, but in these plain-text-tables,
> I am unable to read the information properly. It basically gets read to me
> without structure.
>
> Therefore I'd like to request the following:
>
> 1.  There's an image with a useless description. It is located below the heading
>     "Suite and Architecture". The line there looks like this (for me):
>
>         unreproducible 2016.10.22-1 in testing diffoscope logo
>
>     I find "diffoscope logo" to be not very helpful, especially because it's a
>     link pointing to a resource.
When you said there is an image with a useless description, do you mean
the image labeled "unreproducible" at the beginning of the line or do
you mean the imagine "diffoscope logo" at the end of the line? The
purpose of the "diffoscope logo" link is to be able to navigate between
the html diffoscope output for the same package but on a different suite
and architecture. By navigate between, I mean it will open the html
formatted diffoscope results in the iframe.
> 2.  When clicking the link labelled "diff", it seems as if some kind of sub menu
>     would pop up (correct me, if I'm wrong). That is hard to figure out, because
>     it is not announced. I expected this link to open a new page, therefore I
>     re-read the page and it took me a while to realize that the change was
>     minimalistic. I suppose this is some kind of fancy Java script and I don't
>     know the fix for this (I'm not a web developer at all), but maybe somebody
>     on this list might know. I suppose it could be solved with an ARIA live
>     region.
I'm not sure what you mean by the link labeled "diff"? You are right
that clicking the "version" link ("2016.10.22-1" on the line you
referred to above) or clicking the "diffocscope logo" link will expand a
sub menu (containing more details and links to information about the
results of the tests for the architecture and suite). We don't use any
javascript on the site, however, instead we have static html pages to
show the results of each suite/architecture pair, so these links do take
you to a "new page". The only differences between these pages are the
expanded submenu for the specific suite arch and the iframe will show
the diffoscope output or build information for the that
suite/architecture test.

I'm not exactly sure what to do to make this clear from the perspective
of a screen reader, I'd appreciate any additional insight/feedback/opinions!

Valerie