a11y: keyboard access for interactive spatial views (atlas, square, latent space)
Nobody has claimed this yet.
Assessment
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Newbie friendliness
- 42/100
- Issue type
- Feature
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Tech stack
- typescript
- Domain
- accessibility, frontend
Research direction
Start with apps/smartem/src/components/spatial/AtlasMap.tsx, SquareMap.tsx, and LatentSpacePanel.tsx, then review biome.json and the listed lint findings. Decide an interaction model for dense SVG maps before implementing keyboard focus, activation, traversal, and visible focus indicators. Done means the components support keyboard and screen-reader access and the corresponding Biome rules can be enabled without findings.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
Retargeted. This issue originally listed three findings, all in app/routes/squareLR.tsx in
the legacy front end. That app was removed in smartem-frontend#136 and the file no longer
exists, so the original findings are moot. Reviewing them against the current front end
(per the earlier comment: "see if any of this applied to the new f/e, recycle or dismiss"),
one of the three carries over.
Dismissed - now structurally prevented
Missing alt text and SVG without <title> cannot recur silently. biome.json sets
recommended: true with the a11y group active, lint is enforced in CI, and
biome lint apps/smartem/src packages currently passes with zero findings. There are no
<img> elements without alt in the codebase.
Recycled - interactive elements without keyboard support
The original third finding (interactive SVG elements reachable only by mouse) has reappeared in
the new spatial components. Running the full a11y rule group reports:
apps/smartem/src/components/spatial/AtlasMap.tsx:318 noNoninteractiveElementInteractions
apps/smartem/src/components/spatial/SquareMap.tsx:481 noNoninteractiveElementInteractions
apps/smartem/src/components/spatial/AtlasMap.tsx:371 useSemanticElements
apps/smartem/src/components/spatial/SquareMap.tsx:550 useSemanticElements
apps/smartem/src/components/spatial/LatentSpacePanel.tsx:143 useSemanticElements
The practical consequence: the atlas and square maps are the primary navigation surface, and
grid squares are selected by clicking SVG shapes. Those targets cannot currently be reached or
activated by keyboard, so keyboard-only and screen-reader users have no route into the
per-square views at all.
Why CI does not catch this
Neither rule is active under the current configuration:
noNoninteractiveElementInteractionsis not part of Biome'srecommendedset, so it never
runs unless explicitly enabled.useSemanticElementsis explicitly switched off inbiome.json.
Worth confirming whether disabling useSemanticElements was a deliberate decision for the
spatial components (where a semantic element may genuinely not fit inside an SVG) or was
inherited. If deliberate, the exception is better expressed narrowly than globally.
Scope
- Make grid squares and foil holes focusable and activatable by keyboard in
AtlasMapand
SquareMap, with a visible focus indicator that works against the underlying imagery. - Decide the interaction model for a dense SVG map before implementing - tabbing through
several hundred foil holes individually would be worse than no keyboard access. Roving
tabindex over squares, with arrow-key traversal within a square, is the likely shape. - Apply the same treatment to
LatentSpacePanel. - Once the components conform, enable the corresponding rules in
biome.jsonso the class of
problem stays fixed rather than recurring.
Priority
Real but not urgent, and honestly assessed: the enforced rules already cover the common cases,
and this affects an internal scientific tool with a small known user base. It is recorded here
so the gap is known rather than rediscovered.
- Dominant language
- TypeScript
- Stars
- 0
- Forks
- 0
- PR merge metrics
- No merged PRs in 30d
Contributor guide
No contributing guide indexed for this repository
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
More from DiamondLightSource/smartem-devtools
-
security
Difficulty 4/5 3-5 days Newbie friendliness 48/100
-
Dependency Dashboard Open
Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 15/100
-
research security
Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100
-
devops research smartem-agent
Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 25/100
-
enhancement smartem-devtools:claude
Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 45/100
All issues in DiamondLightSource/smartem-devtools
Similar issues
-
VerificationGate: ATTRIBUTION quote guard never matches a normal quotation (\b around the quote) Open
Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 75/100
danielmiessler/LifeOS#2234 ·
-
T: Bug
Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 75/100
-
Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 65/100
-
Difficulty 1/5 Under an hour Newbie friendliness 85/100
-
Mend: dependency security vulnerability untriaged
Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 70/100