iD/ACCESSIBILITY.md

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.

Symbols used in this document:

• ✅ Full support
• 🟩 Full support assumed but unverified
• 🟠 Partial support
• ❌ No appreciable support

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.

	Browser	Notes
✅	Chrome
✅*	Firefox	*Minor known issues (#7132)
✅	Safari
🟩	Opera	Infrequently tested
🟩	Edge	Infrequently tested
🟠	Internet Explorer	Infrequently tested. IE has been discontinued, but IE 11 is still maintained. iD polyfills ES6 features on IE 11, with varying success.
🟠	Mobile browsers	iD has not yet been fully optimized for mobile devices, but some editing is usually possible.

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)
✅	Locale URL parameters	locale and rtl can be used to manually set iD's locale preferences. See the API
🟩	Right-to-left layouts	Infrequently tested. 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
✅	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
❌	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
✅	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.

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Further sections coming soon…