Accessibility is for Namirial an important aspect of inclusion in the whole process from defining an envelope, sending the envelope to the signer and signing a document. All new features are evaluated for meeting minimum accessibility criteria, while existing functionality which was developed over a longer period is adopted to meet current requirements.
In some countries of the world, accessibility is already enforced by law in general or for use in specific business. With the "EU Accessibility Law" (official title: "Directive (EU) 2019/882 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on the accessibility requirements for products and services") it is expected that many of those requirements are also formally adopted to national law in the countries of European Union within the next years.
This document focuses on following components of the "eSignAnyWhere Platform":
- "eSignAnyWhere WebUI", used by the person defining and sending an envelope
- "SignAnyWhere Viewer", used by the signer to read a document and sign a contract
Following aspects of accessibility are considered in general:
- Screen Design
- Fonts and icons are chosen in compliance with WCAG 2.1.
- Colors can be adjusted for the signer front-end; and an alternative color scheme is available for On-Premise and Private-SaaS instances, to meet the WCAG 2.1 contrast requirements.
- Scalability: Responsive design ensures that the web user interface is still usable when selecting higher zoom factors in the browser
- Keyboard-Only operability
- Default-Buttons are defined for dialogs where applicable ("Esc" for the cancel-buttons; "Return" for the default-button when not contraindicated by other elements in the dialog)
- Keyboard navigation: all mandatory product features can be reached through keyboard navigation ("Tab" key to navigate to next element, "Shift+Tab" to navigate to previous element)
The current keyboard focus is highlighted with a high-contrast focus indicator.
- Use of Simple language
- The product aims for using a simple language
- Context specific help
- The product provides a context sensitive help on each product page reachable via the "help" icon (round circle with a question mark)
- Where applicable, validation errors related to user input are highlighting in which field an unexpected input was provided
Following application functionality does not offer the full feature set in adequate accessibilty mode:
- Product features where security or legal requirements contraindicate alternative implementation
- e.g. for the signer, a flat picture rendering of the original contract is shown in the SignAnyWhere Viewer. The flat picture represents a rendering of the original contract uploaded by the sender as it was provided. Even if the document does not fulfill color contrast requirements, or is using very small font sizes, it is displayed as it was defined/provided by the sender.
- Some settings in the product configuration
- Graphical editors such as the editor for Team Configuration are not providing keyboard-only functionality.
- Interactive What-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) designer
- The functionality to place form fields and signature fields is not offering keyboard-only functionality.
For the designer, we suggest to prepare the document in a word processing application that meets accessibility requirements and export it as PDF. Form fields and signature fields can be inserted and assigned to a recipient as text elements using the "Advanced Document Tags" syntax.
Another option is to work with prepared templates where all interactive fields have been placed in the template already. The PDF document can be exchanged when using a template, even after placing interactive fields in the template.
- The functionality to place form fields and signature fields is not offering keyboard-only functionality.