Accessibility of this Platform
Summon is a discovery tool that searches across your library’s holdings for physical and digital resources. When you select a result on Summon, a new tab or window is opened, and you are directed to an external platform that hosts the actual document or item. While we try to make the experience of searching and evaluate results as accessible as possible, we cannot control the accessibility of your experience on these external platforms. If you experience accessibility issues on these platforms, please use their respective contact forms to report your concerns.
Keyboard Access
Most of the website can be navigated with a keyboard alone, but there are several areas that are currently inaccessible or hard to access.
Because the search results load continuously, the areas that appear after the results (on the right side of the page) cannot be accessed by simply tabbing through the page. To access these sections of the page, we recommend you navigate using headings; the titles of the sections are marked with heading level 3.
A small number of areas are inaccessible with keyboard navigation. On the Saved Items page, the citation style selection dropdown menu cannot be focused with a keyboard. On the results page, there are sometimes keyboard-inaccessible links that appear at the bottom of result entries for things like “About the author” and “look inside.”
Skip Links
While Skip to content link is available it doesn’t take the user to the content. Users have to tab through the elements to get to the content or utilize the headings.
Status Messages
There are a number of controls within Summon that show and hide information. While this helps sighted users avoid information overload, the status of these controls is not always communicated to assistive technologies like screen readers.
Areas where status is not announced include:
- The suggestions that appear when typing a search.
Color Contrast
Summon meets minimum color contrast standards, but there are cases where text does not have enough contrast with the background color. These relate to supplementary pieces of information around the result items. For example, the color of “Original Research” and page number tags that appear before the titles of some results are too light.
If color contrast is a concern for you, we recommend utilizing one of the free browser plugins that can increase text/background color contrast, such as the High Contrast extension for Google Chrome.
Labels
Throughout Summon, form elements and buttons are given accessible labels, so you can use assistive technologies to determine the purpose of various controls. The majority of elements have labels, but there are a small number of missing labels. In these cases, there are usually adjacent text labels that describe the purpose of the control.
One missing label that might affect your ability to do research relates to the functionality to search within a particular journal. If you want to search within a journal, you can click or select the journal name below a particular result. This will reload the page with the focus on the search input box. Searching at this point will search Summon for results from only the selected journal. In this case, there is a text description above the search box that says “Search within #journal name#” but this text is not assigned as a descriptive label. If you are using a screen reader, this label will not be discoverable.
