Accessibility features overview

Accessibility features assist users who have a disability, such as restricted mobility or limited vision, to use information technology content successfully.

Cognos® Analytics includes accessibility features for navigating the user interface, and for authoring reports so that they're accessible for yourself or others.

The Cognos Analytics web user interface includes WAI-ARIA navigational landmarks that you can use to quickly navigate to functional areas in the application.

The Cognos Analytics user interfaces do not have content that flashes 2 - 55 times per second.

The Cognos Analytics web user interfaces rely on cascading stylesheets to render content properly and to provide a usable experience. If you are a low-vision user, you can adjust your operating system display settings, and use settings such as high contrast mode. You can control font size by using the device or web browser settings.

Cognos Analytics includes the following major accessibility features:
  • Keyboard-only operation.
  • Operations that use a screen reader.
  • User preference and report settings to enable accessibility features.
  • Accessible report output for report runs, including jobs, job steps, subscriptions, and scheduled items.
  • Operable in high contrast modes.
  • Operable when the browser zoom level is increased up to 200%.
  • Accessible visualizations: table, list, and crosstab.
Important: With a Microsoft Windows OS, use the latest release of the JAWS screen reader in combination with the latest Extended Support Release of the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

The first thing to do after you sign in is set your user preference to turn on accessibility features. You want to set this preference because only some parts of the user interface are accessible by default. For more information, see Turning on accessibility features.

With your preference set, you can navigate by keyboard throughout the user interface and you get accessible report output when you run reports that were authored to include accessibility features.

The Cognos Analytics sample report, Employee satisfaction, was authored to include accessibility features. The following figure is an example of output that includes accessibility features.
Figure 1. Accessible output for sample report
Report data is displayed in a table that can be navigated by keyboard
For comparison purposes, the following figure shows the same sample report run with accessibility features disabled and therefore appears with visually oriented graphics.
Figure 2. Output for sample report without accessibility features
Report data is displayed in a bar chart with multiple colors

For information on how to author accessible reports, see Accessible report authoring.