The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) is excited to share that we have completed TAIR’s first Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR), earning ratings of ‘supports’ or ‘partially supports’ across all categories.  We are committed to ensuring our tools are maximally accessible to, and usable by, people with disabilities.

Maximizing accessibility

The Accessibility Conformance Report shows how well TAIR meets accessibility standards, such as WCAG or Section 508, detailing which features ‘supports’ or ‘partially supports’ specific criteria. The report offers transparency, guides remediation, and verifies adherence to the requirements outlined in the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The ACR  explains in greater detail how TAIR conforms to those standards. Armed with this information, all users — old, new, and potential — can understand the usability features of TAIR.

For librarians, ACR disclosures are especially important when evaluating purchases and subscriptions in order to provide the best service to patrons, and to ensure compliance with the law — especially as new Title II standards come into effect in the US this Spring 2026.

At Phoenix Bioinformatics, the nonprofit home of TAIR, we aim to maximize the accessibility of our digital research tools and reduce barriers to participation in scientific experimentation and discourse. We believe that broad, equal participation in the scientific process by a variety of researchers globally helps make science stronger, sparks innovation, and aids in developing more robust solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.

“For Phoenix — as for the librarians who subscribe to TAIR — accessibility is important to our mission,” Phoenix Bioinformatics executive director Josh Young said. “We’re working to build an ecosystem of thriving and diverse digital research resources that are tailored to researcher needs. Modern accessibility standards are a key part of that work.”

Addressing accessibility changes systematically

In order to satisfactorily complete the VPAT template and not register any ‘Do Not Supports’ assessments, we worked with outside experts who painstakingly analyzed 20 different TAIR workflows against the established standards and  identified weaknesses.

“We started by looking at end-to-end user journeys — searching, logging in, managing subscriptions, and accessing content — rather than isolated pages,”  said Swapnil Sawant, a software engineer at Phoenix Bioinformatics. “That kept the work grounded in what people actually do on the site and made it much easier to prioritize what to fix first.” 

After implementing revisions, third party auditors redid their assessment to ensure that our revisions cleared the issues marked as Critical.

One of the biggest challenges of the project was fixing layout issues at smaller screen sizes and higher zoom levels, said Swapnil. “TAIR pages are packed with dense scientific data, tools, tables, and images all on a single screen. The original design didn’t fully anticipate use cases like 200% zoom or very narrow viewports.” Making sure all of that content stayed readable, logically ordered, and easy to navigate without breaking important workflows required careful refactoring. 

The engineering team approached the work as a design-system problem rather than a page-by-page bug hunt. They created an inventory of components that broke down at small widths or high zoom, then updated layout rules, semantics, and responsive behavior in one place and rolled those changes out everywhere they were used. “Our component-based front-end architecture helped a lot here. Once we figured out how a particular pattern should behave responsively, we could apply that fix consistently across the site,” Swapnil recalled.

He recommends a similar approach to other research sites and digital tools undertaking accessibility upgrades. “An external audit is extremely valuable for depth and rigor,” he said. Another lesson is to treat accessibility as part of the design system, rather than making individual or ad hoc changes. That saves time and makes future changes easier to manage.

What’s next for the TAIR platform?

TAIR’s accessibility-related improvements won’t stop with the ACR completion. Swapnil and team are planning follow-up improvements, including more robust labeling and behavior for complex forms like advanced search and subscription flows. They also intend to incorporate automated accessibility checks into the standard development operations workflow, so future site changes meet standards before they go live on TAIR.