XWIKI-19723: Navigation panel not accessible using a screen reader

[Sereza7]

Jira URL

https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-19723

Changes

Description

• Added a sr-only description next to every tree AFAIK. This works for the navigation panel.
• Added a default id for document trees
• Added a translation key to contain the tree technical description.

Clarifications

• The ids of the description objects are not always unique. It'd be great to have an access to the JSTree instance_counter to generate those, but unfortunately it's not possible easily, and afaics any solution would have to be a bit hacky. Setting up our own velocity templating counter does not work since we load this tree.vm script multiple times. It's technically bad to have multiple items with the same ID, however here it's for literally the same item/content, so it doesn't matter much (only the DOM position changes). Thanks to the resilience of web browsers and NVDA, we can see that everything still works correctly :)

Screenshots & Video

Here are some demos I took with Chrome 131, NVDA and some XWiki 17.0.0 snapshot run locally.
Before the changes
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/8016dc85-289f-417f-95d9-ff9a4d9501c7
We can see that the state of the tree is properly conveyed. However when the user arrives on it, nothing is said about how to operate it.
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/5afb6262-3a5d-4c8b-820e-5cf0b20b9e09
Now, right when the user tabs to the tree, info about how to handle it is read out. Note that this info is read again when the user clicks on a X more link that reloads the whole tree. It could be a small annoyance but the benefits far outweight this drawback.

Executed Tests

First, I successfully rebuilt all of the module affected by some changes: mvn clean install -f xwiki-platform-core/xwiki-platform-tree/xwiki-platform-tree-macro ;mvn clean install -f xwiki-platform-core/xwiki-platform-tree/xwiki-platform-tree-war; mvn clean install -f xwiki-platform-core/xwiki-platform-index/xwiki-platform-index-tree/xwiki-platform-index-tree-macro. I went through the TreeElement BaseElement for docker tests, and it seems like the changes brought do not impact any xpath or query used in there. I then ran the tests on the whole xwiki-platform-index module with mvn clean install -f xwiki-platform-core/xwiki-platform-index/xwiki-platform-index-test/xwiki-platform-index-test-docker -Dxwiki.test.ui.wcag=true. The tests passed properly and no WCAG failure was found. They extensively use the TreeElement and child classes.

Expected merging strategy

• Prefers squash: Yes
• Backport on branches:
  • 16.10.X (relatively safe changes, even though the scope of the UI changes is quite large)