My institution is undergoing an accessibility review, and we’ve been asked to request VPAT’s (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) for all the applications we use in our day-to-day work. Based on the documentation I’ve come across it doesn’t look like Open Refine has done much in the way of accessibility, but still putting in a request for that here. From what I understand, many colleges are currently undergoing these accessibility review, so this is something that may come up often in the near future.
@Joseph_Anderson thanks for the request. OpenRefine is mostly a volunteer-run project; I am not sure what the effort required to produce (and maintain) such a report would be. I'll raise the questions to the designers within our network.
One option I once considered for a different open source project was to sponsor a VPAT. Below is the name of the firm I reached out to about this. Hopefully OpenRefine would have funding from existing sources to cover this cost, but if not, perhaps a member of the community or a group of interested institutions could pool resources to sponsor it. (In the case I shared below, we didn't end up needing to sponsor it - but it still seems like a feasible idea.)
We have in the past been working quite a lot on this, not so much for regulatory needs as we aren’t covered by such rules but because it makes the life of staff and contractors better. There are more to do across the board(live areas, contrast, animations, etc) but it should all be more or less doable.
Note that improving accessibility, a worthy goal which Albin described some progress towards, and documenting the current state of accessibility (e.g. VPAT) are two different things. Anyone can fill out a VPAT and share it with others who have been mandated the same "voluntary" requirement. It doesn't need to be the development team (or an external vendor).