When using a text-only browser or a screen reader, it's impossible to discover that collapsible sidebar items are indeed collapsible. The headings are plain h5's, there's no way to know they could be clicked to expand (this also works nicely with space or enter - if you know that it's possible).

There are several ways to address this: one would be to set an onclick event handler (screen readers like JAWS recognize this, at least if it's done directly in the HTML tag), or make the heading a link with a javascript URL (not sure of the implications).

However, it should be investigated if WAI-ARIA properties could be used to make this more accessible to non-mouse-users.

This issue is somewhat related to bug #24581.

This report results from feedback from the German Central Library for the Blind
(DZB). Please see
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Accessibility#Feedback_from_the_DZB.2C_June_2010
for some background.

Version: 1.17.x
Severity: minor
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24581