Richard Smith
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

In recent months I have had the pleasure of working with customers who take accessibility just as seriously with their implementation on the platform as we do at ServiceNow. The product is not perfect, but perfection is impossible.

 

Accessibility standards are regularly improved upon, with the bar being raised regularly, and therefore there is always more to do. This is a great thing for everyone. It's equally good when customers you work with are pushing for improvements too.

 

I noticed whilst looking at the Yokohama release notes that a small but great feature has been added to the product to help customers keep content they create themselves inline with accessibility standards: their knowledge articles.

 

The accessibility checker has been added to the TinyMCE editor you use to edit knowledge. It's available by default with no config required.

 

I checkout and OOTB article and check it, hitting the Accessibility Checker option

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This article appears clear. So lets mess it up a little and retry that.

 

RichardSmith_8-1744045071304.png

 

There are now 4 issues I can spin through. The first, the table without captions - I am given an option to provide a caption in this dialogue and repair it.

RichardSmith_9-1744045112033.png

 

As soon as I type a caption and hit repair, I'm into the next finding and my article has been updated. 3 of the 4 issues can be corrected inline like this, with the fourth - the issue with my awful choice of contrasting colours needing me to dive back into the editor proper.

 

The accessibility checker (linked from most of the findings for referenced/more info) is found here.

 

A statement from ServiceNow on accessibility relevant to the Platform can be found here.

4 Comments
Phil A
Tera Contributor

should this just appear ( I have repaired the tinyMCE plugin) or do I need to configure the dictionary attribute Configuring the TinyMCE toolbar via Dictionary attributes, I think we may have customised in the past

Eoghan Sinnott
Kilo Sage
Kilo Sage

Hi @Phil A,

 

It wouldn't allow me reply to your comment but you do need to configure the dictionary attribute to have the Accessibility Checker added to your toolbar.

 

In the knowledge article right-click on Article Body and and select Configure Dictionary.

Right-click on the header and selecting View - Advanced. 

In the Attributes section you need to add in a11ycheck to where you want the button to appear. Press Update and then it should be in your toolbar. 

 

Regards,

Eoghan

 

Please consider marking my reply as Helpful if this works.

 

jmaher1
Tera Explorer

In addition to the a11ycheck in the buttons section, you also need to add a11ychecker to the plugins section of the dictionary attributes field. As always a developer instance is helpful to discover things like this till the documentation is updated.

jschnoll
Tera Contributor

Hi @Richard Smith Is ServiceNow's accessibility checker tool aligned with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). If so, could you clarify which version of the WCAG it references or adheres to?