Discussion: Accessibility for iNaturalist

General
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Dear community,

I opened this topic because I would not be able to ask for so many specific feature requests at once, and it would take me years to list them all given I can only ask for one per day, 2-3 per week. Rather, I’d like to bring up the topic and ask how other community members and developers feel about improving iNaturalist’s accessibility.

Accessibility, what do you mean?

Everyone generally knows this, but it’s never a bad idea to recap and introduce it. Accessibility is the field that ensures (in this case) apps and websites can be used as seamlessly by people with and without disabilities. This means, according to the WCAG (Web content accessibility guidelines), that all content must be:

  • Perceivable;
  • Understandable;
  • Operable;
  • And Robust.

Perceivable content

Generally, this means everyone should be able to perceive all content. If you are deaf, you need captions/alternatives for sound, and if you are blind or have any form of vision loss, some way to help you “see” visual content should be there. Being blind doesn’t mean only that you see “zero”: it might mean your vision if more foggy or you have tunnel vision. Features that help you see a visual content better will help you identify your species.

Example:

  1. When we post a picture, a person who’s blind or has low vision needs to have a way of looking at it. Therefore, we need a way to add alt text to our pictures.
  2. When we compare our pictures against a species page, it would be helpful if species page would need to describe what that species looks like, feels like, and smells like. Not only pictures, but describing other characteristics, and having good descriptions of the visual part as well.

Now, this is an authoring content platform and this would be prone for many errors at user level, but for example. If I take a picture of a poppy flower, I would be able to add alt text or a description to that picture and say: “Single small flower with thin red petals that look and feel like crumpled paper”

To help people write these descriptions, iNaturalist could add a helpful alt text guide whenever we try to edit it. We could also have a way for other users to suggest editing the alt text. Plus, having the description on the species page would help us…

(Edited to add: I’m not sure I still agree with the following sentence I wrote, but I’ll keep it here for the discussion:) …and it could even suggest alt text when we have the picture already graded.

We can’t force everyone to write alt text or ensure it will always be correct, but this could be a step in the right direction. Also, providing other senses in the descriptions and encouraging to do so (e.g. the plant has a sour smell, or sweet fragance.)

Edited to add: This also encompasses that things have enough contrast and things don’t rely on color only (looking at you, hotspot pins in blue, red and green) to ensure colorblind users also are kept in the loop.

Understandable

This is mostly about instructions and clear wording. When filling out forms, every form field should have a label attached to it (this bit is related to Perceivable and Operable) but also the instructions on how to fill it should NOT be placeholder text, but somewhere else - in an “i” for info icon, or in the label itself, or something similar. It can’t be placeholder text because:

  • Placeholder text isn’t read to screen readers; and:
  • It disappears when you start to type, which is very unhelpful for people with any kind of cognitive difficulties, and everyone as a whole.

Edited to add: Some others things are the uncountable times I find icons or colors I don’t understand the meaning of, and they don’t have a label to explain what they mean. I’m lucky not to be colorblind, but I still don’t know what the map hotspots in blue mean versus the ones in red and green. I know the green one is for plants, but I don’t know the others. There isn’t any caption/legend/label. And there are other unlabelled icons in other places.

Operable

Now this one’s really interesting and I’m mostly concerned about the maps here. My question is: can people with mobility impairments navigate the maps, or are they only interactable by touch? (Mouse/finger/cursor).

The answer is: No, they can’t interact with it with a keyboard or a switch device, etc.

Try navigating google maps with your keyboard and you’ll see that you actually can use the arrows to move and it’ll have a square around an area, and within that area it’ll associate numbers to important spots like 1 - Naughty Children High School, 2 - Tropical Garden of Eden, 3 - Hospital Poppy Hill. You can then click on the number and it’ll open the pop-up for that place.

Keyboard accessibility can be complex for maps, but it’s not impossible. It is much easier for other interactive elements. It encompasses a lot of knowledge such as the keyboard focus being visible, and things working as expected.

Another thing that personally affects me is how little the “spots” are, both visually and for touch. I want to zoom in and have the touch target become bigger so I can choose what I want to look at, but it is always the same tiny size. Touch targets have a minimum size as per the WCAG 2.2., and that is 44x44px at AAA (advanced accessibility) level, and 22x22px at AA (intermediate). But like, at least we could add in our settings that the touch target is 44x44px or more, if you only want to provide the bare minimum 22x22px. (I didn’t check for this guideline, I just know I have trouble sometimes and it gives me some anxiety when I try to zoom to have them bigger, but they never get bigger).

Robust

This just means that stuff needs to be compatible with screen readers and all devices and assistive technologies. We ensure this by following the standards already set for all technologies. Example for those who know HTML: Buttons aren’t clickable divss, but actual button elements.

Accessibility Statements and Accountability

It is important (and by some laws, in some places, required) that every organization provides an accessibility statement where they explain exactly how they are commited to accessibility, and even better if they explain where the app is or isn’t accessible, and what efforts they are doing to make it better.

For example, it sounds like iNaturalist has been promising users a more accessible app for years, but I don’t see any Accessibility Statement explaining “We’re building and will launch an accessible app by XYZ date”, any goals, and stating exactly how the app is or isn’t currently accessible - to all users, not only screen reader users.

I had to dig to find a few comments in a forum thread about this, which to me feels like they don’t put accessibility at the front and hold themselves accountable in a public-facing way. It doesn’t tell me, when I arrive, when can I expect the app to be accessible or if they are working on it, and how, and what their goals are, etc.

Conclusions

I wanted to open this topic because I’m a digital accessibility professional and I want to recommend this app to my friends and unfortunately I absolutely cannot do it for friends with disabilities because the app and the website are nearly impossible to navigate and use, and definitely not fully functioning for essential tasks with assistive technologies.

My request is that iNaturalist thinks about this and does something about it.

Funnily enough, my guess is probably not that many people with disabilities will be here, at least the ones barred by these barriers - disabilities and impairments and difficulties are not an “all or nothing”, of course.

The goal is that they are not kept from this discussion nor from being helpful contributors to mapping and identifying our natural ecosystems.

How can I add to the discussion?

Apart from any and all thoughts you have about this topic, I suggest you share links to other topics about accessibility, add your concerns about accessibility, how things affect you, and if you have friends who can’t use the app/website because of a disability. I’d love to see a discussion about this thriving.

Other threads:

I found the following threads about similar topics. Some might have been fixed by now; I can't guarantee they're still requested bugs/features. I'll edit the post to add more as I find them.

Other notes

Edited to add: Headings, many links to the list of threads about accessibility, new examples of some gripes, etc.
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I am profoundly unilaterally Deaf, and I am here! :)

I would like to share my imput, although iNaturalist is definetely easier for me to access than it might be for others. Although I can hear a bit, I can’t hear as well as the average hearing person, and can’t hear at all in a crowded busy area. I don’t usually ID audio, but when I do it is an animal whose call I am familiar with, (basically just Northern Bobwhites) and I play the audio over and over again on high volume.

One thing I do notice with audio is that having a clear, short recording really helps me to hear the actual creature. Although I cannot speak for the blind iNat community, I would guess that they prefer to ID clear audio as well. For images, alt text would likely be helpful as well.

I wonder if iNat could create a page or section on iNaturalist on making our own observations more accessable. If iNat has a page that suggests that users do their best to do things such as:

  • upload clear audio
  • upload crisp, clear images for users who can see a bit
  • Add alt-text

I think people would listen. I could see an accessibility webinar being something useful as well.

Overall, in my experience, people want to help out and accomedate for others. @tiwane, do you think a page/article/webinar on how users can make their observations more accessible would be helpful?

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Oh man, I hope the iNat team takes advantage of your expertise.

YES to your point about the print on the maps not getting larger when you zoom in. I use a magnifying glass over the screen to read road names, etc. Another, similar point is how the location overlay for observations obscures the map.

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There are a lot of people with disabilities on iNat. Here are a couple of threads, although these tend to be about difficulties out in the field, not so much about using the site:

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/inatting-nature-hikes-while-injured-handicapped/7568/7
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/deaf-and-hard-of-hearing-naturalists/46829/3
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/neurodiversity-and-inaturalist/17268/139

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Fair enough, thank you for the links and the call out. It’s actually nice to see people with disabilities around! And great to add to the discussion.

I think my point was, and I could be wrong: I was presuming casual users like me, but with a disability added on top of it, would have more trouble and there would be less of them, proportionately, than there are fully abled users. Especially, being a very visual app, for people with vision impairments.

My wish was that blind users wouldn’t have to memorize unlabelled buttons, and mobility impaired users could add specific localizations and seamlessy use all interactive elements. I can imagine the learning curve is extra hard for the casual person who simply heard of the app and wanted to try it. I can’t in good conscience recommend it to a blind friend unless they brought it up in the first place that they’re looking for this specific kind of app.

If people can find workarounds, that is good, but I am hoping they don’t have to, and I’m not sure there are workarounds for everything in the app. Not every user with a disability will feel the burden of learning curves in the app will be worth the effort.

Thank you for the links, the experience of those users might be helpful to add to this discussion of the app accessibility. For example, I see some posts there about sound IDs. Also another user here in the thread is deaf and talking about clear sound recordings.

I was thinking, adding to that, I have a book about birds that explains how the bird calls are like - it describes the sound in detail, in a way I couldn’t even imagine to describe myself. This type of description would be a helpful aid and alternative for bird sounds posted in the species page as the one for us to compare our recording with.

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I also have one deaf ear. Cannot hear in stereo - so I skip any obs with audio.

Zooming in to hit The Spot drives me mad. Somewhere on the Forum @tiwane said iNat wasn’t designed for touchscreen? Hopefully that can be improved in future.

An explanation for map dots in red, or blue - would be useful to ALL newbies.

The alt text for photos, and the verbal description of a taxon - both fit nicely with (spoiler alert - heated!! opinions on both sides - you can use the hamburger icon at the bottom to collapse the thread to most engaged / engaging comments. Or the twinkly stars for a computer generated summary)
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-is-this-inaturalist-and-generative-ai/66140

About those placeholders ?
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/placeholder-backup/journal/98782-placeholder-backup-project-what-is-it-and-why

I added alt text for my blog photos. I knew of 3 readers - macular degeneration, double vision, brain injury decades ago.

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I have eyesight problems that come with old age, perhaps that is why many of my observation pics are fuzzy and blurred. Why is grey used as a colour for some text, dates and times on this page and icons. Why can’t we have something bolder, like black instead of grey ? Are many power users of iNat, elderly, retired people who have plenty of spare time to devote to iNaturalist but have difficulty reading the pale grey text. Why is pale grey the in-colour, these days ? What is special about grey, when there are so many other colours that are bolder and brighter for us oldies? I see that some icons change from pale grey to black when my mouse cursor touches them. It may be better the other way round. I would rather have a screen full of LSD induced, bright Acid colours for ancient grey-haired hippies like myself.

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Then I need an option to turn off.

  • Dark mode
  • neon colours

Accessibility options should be an available choice.

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Completely agree with your point, botswanabugs, about low contrast impacts older people, and anyone with not-perfect vision. It’s interesting the bit about retired people having more time on their hands and interest to go around mapping taxons and possibly being a big demographic of the platform.

The WCAG states that the minimum color constrast ratio should be 4.5:1 (for normal text) and 3:1 (for big text), and that is the bare minimum. Neon colors or not, they should follow that at least.

But also agreeing with Diana, lots of users also have trouble with very high contrast stuff that is pure white text on pure black backgrounds, or the opposite. I also struggle a lot with “dark modes” that have pure black backgrounds with pure white text. It’s also a struggle for people with dyslexia as far as I know, or some people who suffer from glare (I do, a bit) and astigmatism (also me!). Discord is a good example of how to do dark modes: their dark mode has a dark grey background, instead of pure black, and it still has good contrast.

In my opinion the default experience should follow WCAG minimum requirements (level AA) or something between that and level AAA (higher contrast). But for extra extra high contrast (which is also a need for some people), that should could also be available. Or, if they want the high contrast dark mode to be the default, then the other options should also be in the settings, like Diana said.

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https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/poll-how-old-are-you-your-vote-is-not-public/60869
One of the good things about iNat is how we range across the decades. Old, young and in between.

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/recognition-of-young-inatters/31178
We miss Ian Toal - he was a kind and thoughtful man.

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Sharing as a not physically disabled person who tries to think about and improve accessibility in education.

I think the option to add alt text would be amazing and maybe one of the easier improvements to implement. Although it likely wouldn’t be used by the majority of users, I think there’s only benefits to adding it.

As to visual contrast, text colors, etc. besides iNaturalist implementing their own changes, which would be cool, there are some nice browser plugins that can help (though possibly not with the map text). My partner uses the OpenDyslexic extension, which I think can improve contrast due to the weighted letters.

Given that it takes a lot of time and effort for devs to implement changes, I think it would be cool to pool a list of browser extensions people find useful for improving accessibility on iNat. Maybe if there’s enough, it could be posted eventually as a tutorial or something?

I’ll also note that from what I’ve seen, untranslated parts of pages tend to be a bug and could probably be reported as such. e.g. a bug I posted recently turned out to also be un-translated before it was fixed.

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Alt text would surely be useful for image-based parts of the iNat interface.

However, in the case of observation photos, there is a very basic contradiction between the idea of what alt text represents and the purpose of observation photos.

The idea of alt text is that it provides vision-impaired audiences an idea of what the content of the image is. This means that it involves making choices about what is important – what the image shows.

The media evidence provided in an observation is the basis for determining the ID. IDers are supposed to look at the photo (or listen to the audio) and make their own judgement about what it shows.

Reading an alt text is not equivalent to this. Because as soon as we translate this evidence into words, we have started to interpret it and we have selected what to emphasize and what to omit. Even something apparently so basic as “small flower with red petals” is an interpretation of the image – it says that certain colored pixels in a certain shape are petals, that the object in the image is a flower. But what if it isn’t – what if it is a bit of garbage or an artificial flower? What if the “petals” are dried brown leaves, or a butterfly? We can’t evaluate this unless we actually look at the image in question. A textual description assumes what needs to be verified.

Now, there might be other useful applications of textual descriptions of the media evidence (for example, if one wanted to train an AI to interpret photos using human language). But I don’t think they could be considered “alt text” in anything resembling the usual sense of the term – they could not be considered an alternative to the media evidence for the purpose of providing IDs. There is perhaps a parallel with the questions that arise around whether drawings can be considered evidence; while iNat allows drawings, many IDers are uncomfortable with such observations, precisely because when there is no photo it is impossible to be certain what the observer actually saw versus what is their intepretation of what they saw.

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I understand your point and I think it’s an excellent one to bring to discussion. It’s important to take it into account.

I personally would say we should never leave that for AI to do (the supposed alt text, because AI could definitely hallucinate.

On the other hand, if a person could provide textual descriptions, and if other users could confirm or deny these textual descriptions (much like we can agree or disagree with a taxon), then the evidence that the petals are actually petals would be strenghtened. Perhaps the alt text wouldn’t also have to be simply “alt text”, but maybe iNaturalist could add a section to add notes about what it looks like:

I would say that most importantly, the first thing to have alt text needs to be the page of specific species and taxons. That is immediately useful for every user. Plus with a little glossary of anatomy of the animal/flower/fungus for anyone who doesn’t know. This helps immediately with the step about comparing my flower with the flower the ID is suggesting.

If alt text seems to not be the right step for now for user-created photos, then at least we should add a field for “Visual, textural and «fragranceal» description of what I saw”, encouraging users to describe what they saw. With a guide to help on it.

(Edit: Helpful guide about how to take notes about a birds’ behaviour to help identify it: How can I identify birds when they’re flying? )

Note also that these days, screen readers can use AI create their own alt text of a picture for pictures that don’t have it and aren’t marked as decorative, which is immediately worse than a real person doing the description because AI hallucinates. Therefore, there is a bigger need for this to be parsed by users now that a blind person would really have to rely on AI (which, like you say, could think the petals are a butterfly).

This makes me agree with you that if a flower is graded, it doesn’t mean it’s the flower, so automatically adding AI alt text presuming it is a poppy with crumpled red petals is overriding the ability of humans to confirm whether it is or not. So I don’t think anymore that this specific suggestion I made is a good suggestion.

I also reiterate my suggestion of other users being able to confirm the description is correct, and add to it.

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I also just noticed we can’t add headings to our posts here in the forums. This would be a very important addition for long posts. Mine has words in bold, but they should have been headings. And making that intuitive to use.

Further, barely anything in iNat’s forum interface uses headings. In an observation page there are headings, but the hierarchy starts at h4, which is quite confusing.

It’s a bit of thinking about both things: making the authoring part of the platform accessible, and making the interface of the platform accessible. Two different efforts but both very important and not neglectable.

Really as I mentioned I could be here all day, but I suspect an audit to iNat’s accessibility would get a lot WCAG criteria non-compliant. However, getting an audit on that would be an excellent start, to know what to fix and, equally as important, as I mentioned, to share with the public that you know about it and you are working on it.

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And such a confirmation or denial would of necessity be based on examining the image. There is no way to do so based on the description itself, since otherwise there would be nothing to compare the description to. I fail to see the value of an “alt text” when it would not be able to fulfill one of the main purposes of the image being there in the first place (namely, as evidence to be evaluated).

I also suspect that IDers would consider it an additional burden to be expected to review and correct or expand photo descriptions for every observation they look at in addition to their IDing activities (which already involves a very similar process of examining and evaluating images and translating that into an ID by comparing it to known characteristics).

There is already a “notes” section which many observers use for this purpose. No doubt it would add value if more people used it and if they were provided with guidance on what sort of information might be helpful to include, but this is not really about accessibility.

This is again not in any way “alt text” but a species description – a list of relevant diagnostic features. I do not deny that such a feature would be useful, and in fact the ability to create some kind of user-editable taxon page that would include such information is something IDers have been asking for for quite some time. But it has nothing to do with alt text.

Also note that while we are asked to choose photos for taxon pages that are useful for showing diagnostic traits, this does not mean that any individual image featured on the taxon page will show a given trait, and the selection of photos may be edited at any time by users.

The reason I mentioned AI in my previous post is because what you are proposing – describing photos using natural language in such a way that it is relevant for IDing – sounds a lot like some of the discussion surrounding the recent grant iNat has received (linked above in post 6 of this thread).

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Thank you for reminding me. We had a forum user in the past, known as Nonbinary Naturalist, who – before it left the Forums for reasons I won’t get into here – was putting alt text on its images shared to the Forums. For a while, I started doing that, too, hoping that if I helped to set the example, other people would pick it up and it would become a regular thing; but without Nonbinary Naturalist here to keep it top-of-mind, I let the habit lapse.

As it stands now, yes, you are correct – the only way to do this for iNaturalist observations would be to write the alt text in the “Notes” section of the observation.

Is that an iNaturalist problem or an underlying Google Maps problem?

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I think the pin not increasing its size when we zoom is normal behaviour, but it is always annoying when you are trying to get them bigger and the “intuitive” thing we do is zoom. But describing a problem we are annoyed with doesn’t necessarily mean the solution is also the one we try, but it’s funny to see I wasn’t the only one trying to zoom in to have them bigger.

The solution is probably letting us choose the size of our pins or something of that sort, but ALSO, before that, making them bigger in the first place as well. I just checked and the clickable area of iNat’s pins is not nearly close to 22 x 22px wide x tall, which is WCAG’s 2.2. level AA minimum size. Google Maps’ pins are way bigger than iNaturalist’s, just a tad bigger than 22x22 px.

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Great initative by NonBinary Naturalist and you!

I must admit I usually don’t do it for my pictures, call me hypocritical. But it’s make it easier for sure if I had a guide, and if I had the reminder as well. Sometimes, I don’t even know the anatomy of things or how I should describe words.

I do like to provide texture stuff though, sometimes. If a plant is spiky I like to mention it. Or if it has some specific smell. I also just learned that bird behaviour is important to identifying them. I didn’t use to attentively watch birds or plants so much since getting iNaturalist, but as I tried to photograph swallows, I noticed they often run in circles and do these repeated tracks. There’s a beautiful pair of swallows near my grandad’s who must have a nest in a neightbor’s balcony, because they fly there, then they go up and around the building, then they come back a while after. I wonder if they’re building a nest or bringing food for the babies. Now I’m wondering if we can upload videos to iNaturalist. Sorry for the ramble, it was fun to think about it though.

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I see well enough with my glasses–never considered myself visually impaired–and I often have to struggle for several seconds to be able to get the cursor over the pin. It’s pretty annoying.

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We can use headings on the forums! putting ‘h1’ in <> results in this:

h1 heading

Is the above what you were looking for?

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