TOPdesk Accessibility
TOPdesk strives for WCAG 2.2 level AA compliance for the TOPdesk product.
Our current efforts
TOPdesk is a large product that has been around for a while, so we will not reach compliance over night. We are working hard towards this goal however, and understand it will require continuous effort and commitment. What we are doing right now to achieve this goal is:
- Foster a group of people enthusiastic about accessibility to spread awareness and knowledge of accessibility throughout the company.
- Have internal accessibility experts, with or working towards IAAP certification, that colleagues can turn to for high quality advice.
- Providing accessibility training for our staff in the development department.
- Include accessibility into the Minimum Quality Requirements for new products and functionalities.
- Include testing with the NVDA and JAWS screen readers into our development process.
- Building a modern Design System that includes accessibility as a core tenet.
- Evaluate new developments with Accessibility Insights for Web.
Additionally, we are currently actively exploring avenues, including working with third party expert groups, to improve the accessibility of our new developments and increasing the speed of reaching compliance throughout the product.
Feedback on Accessibility
We are very aware that TOPdesk is not fully accessible for users with disabilities yet. Tackling this is a big project with many concerns that will take a while. In the meantime, we are eager to learn from your experiences and any accessibility issues you encounter. In the past this has lead to some high-impact quick fixes to our product that we had completely overlooked!
So please, get in touch through the usual channels, or you can get into contact with our accessibility enthusiasts directly.
What is on the Accessibility Roadmap?
Since we have adopted accessibility into our set of Minimum Quality Requirements, accessibility is integrated into all of our planning and development processes. Therefore, our overall roadmap inherently includes our accessibility roadmap.
What is the current status?
While we cannot yet state that TOPdesk is fully accessible, we are proud to say that many people with disabilities are effective working with our product.
Self-Service Portal
TOPdesk has two major sides, the operator section and the self-service portal. The latter, where your end-users can benefit from the services you offer, performs significantly better with regards to accessibility.
There are areas that provide barriers and configurations that may work better than others. However, we have had a third party audit the most used parts of the SSP in 2020, and although not perfect, it should be workable in most cases.
We can provide the original Dutch report on request, but here is our English interpretation of the audit result from 2020 with updates from October 2022 (DOCX).
Operator Section
In the operator section we have made several improvements for screen reader users, which mean that working as a first-line operator is feasible.
- The main navigation, i.e. the main menu (top-left button), the quick launch bar (left) and the tab bar (top) have been made accessible to screen readers.
- While the Home tab is not usable for a screen reader user, the Taskboard page has been updated with headings and correctly attached labels, making it a fine replacement for the tasks widget for screen reader users.
- The Bookmarks page has gotten a similar treatment to the Taskboard page, allowing screen reader users to keep track of cards like anyone else.
- The search functionality, including the advanced search page, has had the labels attached to the fields, making searching for cards possible.
- And finally, with headings and appropriately attached labels on the general tab of the incident card, screen reader users should be able to be effective first-line operators.
User Settings
In the user settings of the operator section TOPdesk has a small group of accessibility settings.
Expand all groups
For the best experience we do recommend turning on the “Expand all groups” user setting to remove the collapsing behavior of the blocks of data. We’ve found that our current implementation of these collapsible data blocks can be confusing for screen reader users.
Accessible overviews
Also in the user settings you can find a setting for “Accessible overviews”. This turns the highly interactive overview tables of cards into simple tables which is much easier to navigate for screen reader users. However, it also removes the toolbar with actions, some of which can’t be executed in any other way. Therefore we recommend using the regular overviews, although they may need some training.
You may notice some other tables throughout TOPdesk, these are evidence of our ongoing efforts to replace these overviews with proper accessible tables.
Support custom colours
Finally there is the “Support custom colours” user setting. This setting is not for screen reader users but for users who find the white and blue color scheme of TOPdesk challenging. In combination with the Operator Recoloring project, and the Stylus browser plugin, users can change the colors of TOPdesk to something that works better for them.