Manifold Accessibility
This page gathers the IT Subcommittee's resources and reviews of the accessibility of Manifold. This page will be updated as new information is available or further reviews are conducted.
Accessibility Overview
Manifold is a platform for publishing books online that can be locally installed or hosted through Manifold. For our testing, we used the University of Washington's instance. As with PressBooks, the final accessibility of a published book relies on the author to use accessibility best practices. It should be noted that Manifold is grant funded and open source, so updates and responses to accessibility reports may depend on the availability of the incredibly small developer group.
General Information
Known Accessibility Issues
Keyboard Control
The keyboard shortcuts listed on the Accessibility page are standard keyboard navigation shortcuts. Manifold does not have any action-specific keyboard commands; however, Manifold does offer alternatives for drag-and-drop actions (select with spacebar, and use the arrow keys to move). If you use Manifold to host video (rather than embedding YouTube or Vimeo videos), there is no way to use the keyboard to access that video.
Color Contrast
Looking specifically at the backend/editor mode, we weren't able to find areas that required color discernment for navigation or inadequate color contrast. We did note that the fact the entire backend interface is white text on a black background may be difficult for some users to view. Usually, this is something that the user can switch between (light and dark modes). Not having the flexibility to choose may negatively affect a users experience.
In our testing, the backend was responsive to user-set browser defaults around colors (example: white background and black text by default), though it may affect your ability to easily use the site by sight due to the multi-pane view of the backend. For example, the headings have a darker background in default view.
With some of the books that testers looked at, there were some reports of contrast errors, but these are the responsibility of the people who created those books. The issue around headers having contrast errors was reported prior to our testing, and was fixed long after our testing was completed.