This blog was originally published on October 30, 2015.

A customer recently asked a question about Oracle Application Express 5 Universal Theme and its compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Level A standard.  Our team member Anthony Rayner is responsible for the accessibility and assessment of Oracle Application Express releases (among many other things).  He provided such a masterfully written and lucid response that it deserved to be shared on the APEX blog for everyone’s benefit.  My only changes were to “correct” the spelling of some of his English words to American English.  Here it is:

 

Oracle Application Express 5.0, including the Universal Theme (UT) follow Oracle’s corporate web accessibility guidelines, which themselves are based on WCAG 2.0 to ‘A’ and ‘AA’ Level and the applicable standards of Section 508. How well we meet these standards is described in the the VPAT for APEX 5.0, which is the framework’s statement of conformance to these guidelines. In this document you should pay particular attention to any issues cited that are categorized as ‘Affecting Database Applications’ as these are what could affect applications that you build with UT.  I would also like to highlight the following 2 exclusions we have cited in the VPAT, which affect UT. Being cited here means that we make no claims to them meeting the aforementioned guidelines, either because they have not been fully tested, or because they are known to have many issues:

 

  1. Theme Roller – Module available to developers allowing declarative definition of look and feel.
  2. All sample applications, available from the Packaged Applications page in the Application Express development environment. (Specifically these applications, including the UT sample app contain many plug-ins which have not been fully tested by us, and are known to have accessibility issues).

 

In addition to the VPAT, the APEX Release Notes always cites other accessibility bugs which are not severe enough to warrant VPAT inclusion, but we do want to highlight.  Specifically please see section 7.15.2 for issues affecting database applications. I would also like to highlight that a number of Windows High Contrast mode bugs were fixed in APEX 5.0.1, so if you are using APEX 5.0, then I would strongly suggest to upgrade to at least 5.0.1, but preferably of course the latest patch set 5.0.2 which includes these fixes also, and many others not accessibility related.

So to summarize, the base UT theme was tested to these guidelines, with issues against these guidelines cited either in the VPAT or release notes.  However, if you use any additional plug-ins in these applications, then these will need to be assessed from an accessibility standpoint to ensure they meet the required guidelines.

In the future, we want to continue to make it as easy as possible for developers to build accessible applications in APEX, this includes releasing a white paper and also a reduction in the number of exclusions cited in the VPAT.