Accessibility in Enonic

Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, or environments to be available to all audiences. On that note, digital experiences of any kind should be usable by as many users as possible, even if they are impaired in one way or another.

With regulations and SEO punishments looming over anyone involved with web accessibility, you have most likely done some research already. Your organization now needs a compliant CMS to meet the requirements of tomorrow.

This also includes your workforce. They could and should be any kind of people, and the accessibility of your content platform of choice should not hinder them. Let us see how the Enonic platform caters to both visitors and editors.

How Enonic Complies with Accessibility

Keyboard Navigation

Many visually impaired people use software akin to pure keyboard navigation to help them traverse the web. Enonic features a strong keyboard navigation in the content authoring tool Content Studio.

You can use tab, arrow keys, and shortcuts to navigate through the interface for accessible editing. You can switch quickly between fields in the UI, which can also be configured exactly the way you want.

See the full list of the familiar keyboard shortcuts in Enonic.

Image Alt Text

This is hardly a revolution, but Enonic supports the easy handling of image text alternatives for visually impaired users and readers.

No Mandatory Markup

Enonic does not shove in markup. Consequently, there are no limitations on making a service or a website accessible and compliant with WCAG standards. Your developers are in full control.

Fixed Framework

Editors work within a fixed framework to build pages and services, thus potentially ensuring the strict enactment of internal accessibility rules. Enonic also offers flexibility to control structure if needed.

Content Types

Content types lie at the heart of Enonic. The structure of our content model decides how content is represented, making it less dependent on people prone to occasional fallibility.

Automatizing accessibility functions is also possible, like automatically filling out image alt texts based on e.g. machine learning. As accessibility often and mainly is a content job, Enonic enables robust templating.

All these elements make it possible to set up an accessible site without thinking too much about accessibility principles.

Standardization of Forms

All forms in Content Studio and the Enonic platform in general feature a thoroughly standardized use, with clear labelling and a predictable workflow.

Required Fields

A simple but powerful feature. Requiring e.g. image alt texts is fully possible within Enonic’s flexible form management. Also, there is a clear marking of an active field or input, making it easier to focus. Input errors are explicitly marked, too.

Transcripts

It is fully possible to add transcripts to video and audio embedded in Enonic.

Flexible Front-ends

Enonic is completely flexible when it comes to what front-end framework your developers can use while building services and websites. This enables your developers to use any framework that already may have taken accessibility into account.

Integrations

Finally, it is possible to integrate Enonic with voiceover tools, transcription tools, and other helpful tools.

Miscellaneous

Among the big and small features for accessibility in Enonic we find the following:

• Consistent placement of menus
• Consistent use of dialogues
• Support for deep linking for quick navigation
• Support for UI zooming
• Responsive UI adaptable to available screen area
• Use of contrast
• Distance between elements and between text
• Use of "tooltip" on links
• Predictability in changing contexts (e.g. between Content Navigator and Content Editor)
• Error messages are clearly marked and always shown in the same spot

See also: Why choose Enonic's headless CMS when building a Next.js website »

Third-party Tools

While Enonic offers a strong and feature-rich core, one central principle is the ability to integrate the content platform with “best of breed” third-party tools. Two of the ready-made integrations available today as apps on Enonic Market and relevant to accessibility are Siteimprove and SEO meta fields.

Siteimprove

Siteimprove can help your digital experiences to perform better, like increasing your accessibility score, improving your SEO friendliness, ensuring better content quality, or mitigating security issues.

The software is cloud-based and analyzes your digital offerings in order to provide a score and suggestions on how to improve e.g. readability or search engine copy. Furthermore, Siteimprove offers analytics and data privacy tools, allowing you to measure metrics like ROI and to protect the data of your visitors.

SEO Meta Fields

SEO Meta Fields is an app for managing classical SEO options like deciding exactly what title, description, and image will show up in social media and search results.

The app adds Open Graph, Twitter Cards, Google Search Console, and canonical meta-tags to your Enonic site.

First published 19 June 2019, updated 1 November 2023.