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Accessibility & Compatibility
iD aims to make mapping as easy possible for as many people as possible. To this end, we recognize that everyone has different backgrounds, abilities, and technologies, and therefore different needs. Developing for the "average user" will inevitably fail to serve some proportion of mappers. Broadly speaking, iD should strive to follow universal design principles.
This is a living document that details the usability of iD across a number of dimensions, with the intent of identifying and addressing problem areas. Since there are always more factors to consider, no part of this document should be considered complete.
Symbols used in this document:
- ✅ Full support
- 🟩 Full support assumed, but not sufficiently tested
- 🟠 Partial support
- ❌ No appreciable support
- 🤷 Unknown support, none is assumed
Browser Compatibility
As a web app, iD's browser support is fundamental. The user experience should be as equivalent as possible across the latest versions of all modern browsers on all major operating systems. When possible, functionality unsupported by older browsers should fallback gracefully without breaking other aspects of the app.
This table covers high-level compatibility, with individual features to be detailed elsewhere in this document.
| Icon | Browser | Notes | Issues | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ✅ |  |
Chrome | ||
| ✅* |  |
Firefox | *Minor known issues | #7132 |
| ✅ |  |
Safari | ||
| 🟩 |  |
Opera | ||
| 🟩 |  |
Edge | ||
| 🟠 |  |
Internet Explorer | IE has been discontinued, but IE 11 is still maintained. iD polyfills ES6 features on IE 11, with varying success | |
| 🟩 | 🌐 | Others | iD should run without issue on any desktop browser implementing modern web standards | |
| 🟠 | 📱 | Mobile browsers | iD has not yet been fully optimized for mobile devices, but some editing is usually possible |
Input Device Support
iD has traditionally assumed the mapper will be interacting via a mouse and keyboard, but realistically people want or need to use various other input devices.
iD relies on modern pointer events for some interactions, so some devices may see degraded functionality on older browsers.
Setups
The following table lists iD's usability for different setups. A setup is where a mapper is using only the device(s) given in the row.
A setup with "full support" offers functionality equivalent to that of the highest-functioning setup (generally mouse and keyboard). Certain functions may be accessed differently on different setups, such as opening the edit menu via long-pressing instead of right-clicking.
| Icon | Input Setup | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| ✅ | 🖱⌨️ | Mouse + keyboard | iD's original input paradigm. Any mouse-like device such as a trackpad, trackball, or pointing stick is grouped into "mouse" for this table |
| ❌ | ⌨️ | Keyboard only | Not all elements can necessarily be keyed to. Key traps may exists. Geometry editing isn't possible |
| 🟠 | 🖱 | Mouse only | The primary mouse button (e.g. left click) alone is sufficient. Multiselection and disabling of node-snapping aren't possible |
| 🟠 | 🖐 | Multi-touch on a touchscreen | Moving and rotating selections isn't possible |
| 🟠 | ✍️ | Stylus on a touchscreen | Moving and rotating selections isn't possible, nor is selecting multiple features |
| 🤷 | ✍️🔲 | Stylus on a graphics tablet | |
| 🤷 | 🎮 | Gamepad | |
| 🤷 | 🗣 | Voice | Tools like Voice Control on macOS and Windows Speech Recognition allow navigating webpages with voice commands to some degree |
| 🤷 | 🔘 | Switch | Tools like Switch Control on macOS can theoretically replicate mouse and keyboard interactions in most apps |
Devices
This table details iD's support for specific classes of input devices.
"Full support" for a device means that iD reasonably handles its entire range of input on supported platforms. But unlike the "Setups" table above, a given device is not necessarily expected to perform all of iD's functions.
It's impractical to ensure every single input device works as expected, so the table only reflects the support status to the best of our knowledge.
| Icon | Input Device | Notes | Issues | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ✅ |  |
Single-button mouse | Primary click (e.g. left-click) can be used for all pointer interactions. Long-clicking on map features opens the edit menu | |
| ✅ |  |
Multi-button mouse | Secondary click (e.g. right-click) can be used on map features to open the edit menu. Middle click, etc., are not needed by iD but are passed through to the browser | |
| ✅ |  |
Multi-touch mouse | 2D scrolling in the map is treated as panning, not zooming | |
| 🟠 |  |
Vertical scroll wheel | Should zoom the map in and out | #5550 |
| ❌ | Horizontal scroll wheel | Currently does nothing in the map | #7134 | |
| 🤷 |  |
Scroll ball | ||
| 🟩 | 🖲 | Trackball | ||
| 🟩 |  |
Trackpad | ||
| ✅ |  |
Multi-touch trackpad | Pinch-to-zoom and scroll-to-pan are supported in the map | |
| 🟩 |  |
Pointing stick | ||
| ✅ | ⌨️ | Keyboard |
Language Support
English is the language of tags and relation roles in the OpenStreetMap database. It's also the source language of iD's interface, meaning English is the only language guaranteed to have 100% coverage. Despite this privileged position, English proficiency should not be a barrier to mapping.
Most of iD's interface can be translated to essentially any written language via the Transifex
platform. Some languages have region-specific variants, such as Brazilian Portuguese (pt_BR).
Translators are typically volunteers. See the translation guide
for more info.
| Localization Feature | Notes | |
|---|---|---|
| ✅ | Browser language preference | iD tries to use the language set in the browser |
| ❌ | Base language fallback | E.g. if pt_BR is incomplete, pt should be tried before en |
| ❌ | Custom fallback language | If the preferred language is incomplete, a user-specified one should be tried before en (e.g. kk → ru) |
| ❌ | lang HTML attributes |
Helps with text-to-speech, text formatting, and auto-transliteration, particularly when iD mixes strings from different languages |
| ✅ | Locale URL parameters | locale and rtl can be used to manually set iD's locale preferences. See the API |
| 🟩 | Right-to-left layouts | Used for languages like Hebrew and Arabic |
Translatability
The following table details which interface elements can adapt to the mapper's language preferences. This doesn't account for whether they've actually been translated to one or more languages.
| Interface Element | Notes | Issues | |
|---|---|---|---|
| ✅ | Labels and descriptions | ||
| ✅ | Help docs and walkthrough | ||
| ✅ | Letter hotkeys | E.g. S for Straighten makes sense in English, but not every language | |
| ✅ | Preset names and search terms | ||
| 🟠 | Fields | Combo fields may show raw tag values. The Wikipedia field lists Wiki names in their native languages | #2708 |
| ❌ | Tags | OpenStreetMap tags are English-only as a limitation of the database | |
| ❌ | Relation member roles | OpenStreetMap roles are also limited to English | |
| ✅ | Imagery metadata | ||
| 🟠 | Locator overlay | This layer shows feature labels in their local languages | #7737 |
| ✅ | OSM community index | ||
| ✅ | iD validation issues | ||
| ✅ | KeepRight issues | ||
| ✅ | ImproveOSM issues | ||
| ✅ | Osmose issues | Translated strings are provided by Osmose itself, not iD |
Language Coverage
The completion percentages for iD translations constantly change, and so are not listed here. Visit the Transifex project page to see the latest numbers. Typically a few languages (German, Spanish, Japanese…) are kept close to 100% coverage, while most languages have less than 50% coverage.
Further sections coming soon…