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a11y: keyboard access for interactive spatial views (atlas, square, latent space)

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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

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

smartem-frontend

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:

  • noNoninteractiveElementInteractions is not part of Biome's recommended set, so it never
    runs unless explicitly enabled.
  • useSemanticElements is explicitly switched off in biome.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 AtlasMap and
    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.json so 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
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PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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