SIEM app accessibility issues

[snide]

As SIEM moves closer to GA I thought it might be helpful to write up some of the bigger gotchas the app has in terms of accessibility. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and instead covers the really big breaks that prevent the app from being used at all by a Keyboard or Screenreader driven experience:

The drag and drop system is a dead end

SIEM relies on drag and drop to bring content to the timeline. It breaks in the following ways:

1. You can't put any of these elements into the timeline using your keyboard.
2. The default key commands for drag and drop work and announce, but don't actually do anything.

The timeline itself is inaccessible by keyboard

As far as I can tell you can't actually open the timeline flyout using your keyboard.

The timeline doesn't trap focus or provide context

Assuming that you got the timeline up. It doesn't actually trap the focus. There is no real indication or structure to the layout of where you are. No headings, role usage or dialog to screenreaders. Several of the navigation items within the timeline have trouble with focus (options gear as an example)

The core timeline experience has lots of issues

• Once the timeline is up, the same drag and drop problems exist in the results. While the DnD elements are selectable, and give feedback to screen-readers they can do things, they don't actually do anything.
• The filter bar has almost no screenreader context. Lots of generic buttons.
• Lots of the buttons don't receive focus and have no proper context to their actions

Issues in the table itself

• The column headers have duplicate button states and have the same DnD issues
• Focus state within the tables seems to have a lot of problems. You can't seem to use the mouse to create focus.
• The grouped filtering actions can't be triggered from the keyboard (the magnifying glass stuff)
• The rows don't announce with any context. Repeated content like "expand" and "pin" are generically announced.
• It is nearly impossible to tab through beyond the table because of the number of action items. Likely could use some skip links here.
• The customize columns popover doesn't trap focus and has quite a few issues. In general though nothing seems to be labeled and there's no context for screenreaders.

I think at a certain point it might be good for the team to have an intro to accessibility session with @myasonik on how some of these issues might be addressed.

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/siem (Team:SIEM)