Improve accessibility of CRAN website

[AmeliaMN]

I have a blind student learning R with me this semester, and Jonathan Godfrey’s materials (including the BrailleR package!) have been so amazing. But one barrier to accessibility is that the main R website doesn’t seem very compatible with screen readers, which makes it hard to download and install R. I mentioned this to @hturner, and she said an issue here would be one way to flag it.

[hturner]

Yes, I think it is the CRAN website in particular, hence the relevance to this group. Unlike the R project website (https://www.r-project.org/), the CRAN website still uses frames, which I suspect cause a lot of the accessibility issues. Frames are obsolete in HTML5 due to their lack of usability and accessibility (https://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#obsolete-elements). As others have mentioned before, using frames also makes the site look outdated, so updating CRAN to the more modern style of the main R project site would improve the look and accessibility at the same time.

I would be interested to help work on this, perhaps bringing in some expertise from Forwards, we have quite a few people who are interested in accessibility of materials for R users.

[PythonCoderUnicorn]

there is a bug report posted regarding the HTML 4 and the need for HTML 5 for accessibility

https://bugs.r-project.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18149

however there is no specific bug reported that I can see (without signing in) regarding accessibility and screen readers.

[llrs]

Not sure if the switch of HTML5 will make things easier from an accessibility without other changes.
But the issue was closed and now there are some changes on the websites and how help pages are rendered.
For example compare this https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-devel/NEWS.html (new html5) with https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/NEWS.html (old html 4?).

Not sure how helpful will this be but here is a Twitter thread with some images about the changes on LaTeX rendering too. Basically now the equations will show the symbols and glyphs instead of the LaTeX notation.

[benubah]

Not sure, but it seems to me that the proposal is to make https://cran.r-project.org/index.html more accessible.
Switching to HTML5 is a good idea which provides more flexibility accessibility-wise, and I agree that exploring other required changes may also be involved to arrive at full accessibility.