Switching between Default mood to Accessibility mode, without additional clicks in Oracle ADF Application

Hi Folks,

This post onward, I’ll publish my technical articles in both Medium & Blogger accounts. I believe this option allow me to reach new technical enthusiasm audience.

Few months back, I have opportunity to allocate really interesting task. In my organization we have a requirement to allow our Time Entry application to the visual impact users. According to W3.org accessibility mean,

Accessibility addresses discriminatory aspects related to equivalent user experience for people with disabilities, including people with age-related impairments. For the web, accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with websites and tools, and that they can contribute equally without barriers. For more information, see the Accessibility introduction.

In this post I’m not going to explain the way to modification you should do to achieve accessibility in Oracle ADF application. Oracle provide advanced documentation for develop application with the aim of accessibility feature. “Fusion Middleware Web User Interface Developer's Guide for OracleApplication Development Framework” this should be your bible.

But, the way documentation suggest to switch in between accessible mode and default mode is really painful. So I come up with a totally new solution to switching these modes.

If you already refereed Oracle documentation (I highly recommend you to go through it, before try to understand my solution) you have idea about the importance of trinidad-config.xml file. In order to switch application to different modes we should add screenReader/default values to accessibility-mode property.

But we have to configure above mentioned values permanently or we need to provide additional pop-up to choose accessibility preferences and based on the value we should fully refresh web application in each time user login to the system.

Stored a permanent value is not an elegant design, Couse this will ruin ordinary users experience. Providing an additional pop-up also damage minimum click approach in web design world.

Option I

I have two solutions to avoid, above mentioned design problems. In my scenario we have pre known user based, so I created a new attribute in USER_DETAILS table and store accessibility_mode based on user preferences.

But how to change accessibility-mode property in trinidad-config.xml,

Kudos to Session Bean objects, we can simply create a variable in Session Bean scope and assign to accessibility-mode property in trinidad-config.xml. Final solution should be like this.

Option II

Option I, sort of a mediocre solution. Because we need to pre-identified our user’s accessibility preferences. Option II come up with an innovative way, but you have to log Oracle Fusion Cloud first and navigate to your application through Fusion Cloud.

In my organization Time Entry application host as a Non-Fusion application, but authentication through the Fusion Cloud (I’ll write a separate post to describe authentication process).

If I simply explain the authentication process. When you’re Non-Fusion application load, you can generate JSON Web Token (JWT) and pass it as a URL parameter. Oracle HCM Cloud provide SOAP web services to get user details, by passing JWT as an Authorization Header simply call findSelfUserDetails SOAP service to get a AccessibilityMode value. 

Same as the Option I, you can execute the above process inside the Session bean scope and assign SOAP result to accessibilityMode variable.

Hope you got a clear idea about these two options, please feel free to comment your questions.

Happy Coding!

Regards,

Denuwan Hettiarachchi