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Web UI Accessibility Baseline

This document states the accessibility baseline the sqi-server web UI commits to. It is intentionally modest — a floor, not a ceiling — so future contributors know the target and do not regress it. Anything below counts as a bug; going further is welcome.

The audience is operators using a keyboard-and-screen-reader workflow or working in varied lighting on varied displays, not a formal WCAG 2.1 AA certification effort. The UI has no auth flows or modal-heavy interactions today, so the baseline is correspondingly focused.

The three commitments

1. Everything interactive is reachable and operable by keyboard

  • Every control a user can click — nav links, filter pills, sort headers, row actions (cancel, retry, enable/disable), bulk-action buttons, pagination, copy buttons, the submit form, and the log-viewer controls — must be reachable with Tab/Shift+Tab and operable with Enter/Space.
  • Use real semantic elements: <button> for actions, <a>/<NavLink> for navigation, native <input>/<select> for form controls. Do not attach click handlers to bare <div>/<span>. Native elements are focusable and key- operable for free; a <div onClick> is neither.
  • Focus must be visible. Do not remove focus outlines without replacing them with an equally clear :focus-visible style.
  • Interactive elements that toggle or select state expose that state to assistive tech (e.g. aria-pressed on toggle pills, aria-current on the active nav link, aria-sort on sortable column headers, aria-checked on selection checkboxes).
  • No keyboard traps: opening the slide-in log panel or any popover must not strand focus; Esc/closing returns focus to a sensible place.

2. Color usage meets WCAG AA contrast

  • Text and meaningful UI graphics meet the WCAG 2.1 AA contrast minimums against their background: 4.5:1 for normal text, 3:1 for large text (≥ 18.66 px bold or ≥ 24 px) and for the visual boundary of essential controls and status indicators.
  • The design tokens in web/src/styles/tokens.css are the single source of foreground/background pairings. When adding or changing a color, verify the resulting pairing meets the ratio above before committing — do not hand-pick ad-hoc colors in a component.
  • Color is never the only signal. Status is always carried by text as well as hue (see commitment 3); a red/green distinction must remain intelligible to a user who cannot distinguish red from green.

3. Status badges and icons have text alternatives

  • Status is conveyed by a visible text label, not color alone. The StatusBadge component renders the status name (running, failed, succeeded, …) as text inside the colored pill, so the meaning survives grayscale rendering and screen readers.
  • The WebSocket ConnectionStatusBadge (the colored connection dot) must carry a text equivalent — a visible label and/or an accessible name (aria-label / title) such as "Live updates: connected" — so its meaning is not purely the dot color.
  • Icon-only controls (e.g. a copy button rendered as just an icon) have an accessible name via aria-label or visually-hidden text. Purely decorative icons are hidden from assistive tech with aria-hidden="true".
  • Non-text content that conveys information (progress bars, the task-progress fraction) also exposes its value as text or an appropriate ARIA attribute (e.g. role="progressbar" with aria-valuenow/aria-valuemin/aria-valuemax).

What is explicitly out of scope for this baseline

These are not regressions to file against; they are deliberately deferred:

  • Formal WCAG 2.1 AA conformance auditing and a published VPAT.
  • Full screen-reader walkthroughs of every view with assistive-tech matrices.
  • Reduced-motion, high-contrast-mode, and forced-colors theming.
  • Localisation / RTL layout.
  • Automated accessibility gating in CI (axe-core or similar). Encouraged later; not required now.

How contributors uphold this

  • Tab through your change. Before opening a PR, navigate the affected view with the keyboard only. Every control you added must be reachable, operable, and show a visible focus ring.
  • Prefer semantic HTML over ARIA. A correct native element beats a div patched with role and tabindex. Reach for ARIA only to fill a genuine gap.
  • Pull colors from tokens and confirm contrast for any new pairing.
  • Give every non-text indicator a text equivalent — a label, visually-hidden text, or an ARIA value.
  • Spot-check with a screen reader (VoiceOver on macOS, NVDA on Windows) when you add a new interactive pattern.

See web-development.md for the development workflow and the CONTRIBUTING.md "Web UI contributions" section for the component and testing conventions these checks fit into.