The Accessibility of Course Management Systems: Can You Read This If You’re Blind?

1. The Accessibility of Course Management Systems: Can You Read This If You’re Blind? Joe Wheaton, The Ohio State University Ken Petri, The Ohio State University Alan Foley, The University of Wisconsin-Madison Mike Elledge, Michigan State University Kostas Yfantis, The University of Illinois-Champaign/Urbana

2. Why Accessibility? Accessible… • Content design improves learning for all users • Interface usability improves for all users • Page code is more portable, semantically rich (i.e., minable), & lighter • It’s [probably] the law“It’s the right thing to do”

3. Four Main Categories of Disability Accommodation • Visual (blindness, low-vision, color-blindness) • Motor (traumatic injuries, congenital disorders and diseases) • Auditory (full or partial hearing loss) • Cognitive (attention deficits, learning disabilities in reading, comprehension, memory, problem-solving, math or graphic interpretation)

4. Visual Impairments • Screen readers can render well formatted pages well • See an example at http://www.doit.wisc.edu/accessibility/video/intro.asp

5. Motor Impairment • A famous scientist at your university has ALS and is unable to use the mouse • He navigates the web with the special software that activates the keyboard

6. Auditory Impairment • A student researching famous speeches in American history • Student locates site with only audio clips of many speeches • Alternately, the student finds a great speech that is captioned

7. Cognitive Disability • Professor who struggles with reading comprehension understands much better through listening • Professor listens to websites through a screen reader like Kurzweil

8. Sakai Mike Elledge

9. Navigation: Accesskeys, skip links, headings Content: Titles, summaries Functional: Label For/ID, Fieldset/Legend, Scope Presentation: CSS Mostly Section 508/WCAG 1.0 Compliant JavaScript must be enabled Scale > 200% not useable JSF “Accessibility” Content scrolling (CSS) Miscellaneous “Bugs” Natural language not identified in header Code burps Sakai Accessibility Elements

10. Annotated Screenshot Go to Accessibility Information (h1) Jump to Worksites (h1) Jump to Content (h1) (h2) “Sort by Audience” (h3) Jump to Tools (h1) (h4) Label for / id (h4) “Table contains a list of announcements.” (s) (x)

11. Sakai Accessibility Information • Home Page: • http://issues.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/LgI • Review Protocol and Templates: • http://issues.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/Wok • Email List and Archive: • http://collab.sakaiproject.org/ • Compliance: • http://issues.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/kR4 • Repairs: • http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?mode=hide&requestId=10254

12. What’s Next* • Eliminate last iFrame (screen resizing and navigation) • StyleAble: User-specified presentation (font size, reverse type, redisplay, etc.) • Identify/Integrate more accessible open source text editor • Enhance JSF widgets • Integrate accessibility reviews with QA process • FLUID Interface • Accessible AJAX • Sakai Materials Assessment and Repair Tool (SMART) *Proposed (“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus”)

13. WebCT Kostas Yfanis

14. WebCT Vista(Blackboard Enterprise Vista) • UIUC’s Flagship Learning Management System • 1,100 courses • 31,780 unique students • Accessibility Partnership • CITES Educational Technologies • http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/edtech • Illinois Center for Instructional Technology Accessibility • http://www.cita.uiuc.edu/

15. Illinois Compass Home

16. Sample Course

17. Existing Challenges Pop-up windows Java applets Missing headers & image labels Others:http://www.cita.uiuc.edu/collaborate/webct/problems.php Improvements Heading structure Added alt text for images Expanded labels for form controls Language definitions Accessibility Issues

18. A Proactive Approach • Work with your accessibility team • Collaborate with other institutions • Do the versions match? • Can you involve the software developers and quality assurance team of the vendor? • If you use WebCT, then join our group • http://www.cita.uiuc.edu/collaborate/webct/person.php

19. Desire To Learn (D2L) Joe Wheaton and Ken Petri

20. D2L Class Page (v. 7.4)

21. 2 Frames, No Headings

22. Fangs Add-on for Firefox

23. OSU’s Web Accessibility Center

24. D2L User-Vendor Collaborations • First accessibility audits by OSU Web Accessibility Center • Spring 2005 and 2006 • Active collaboration begun June 2006 • Accessibility panel at D2L 2006 Users Conference (UC06) • Current round of evaluations on pre-production version (v. 8.2) • Looking at specific interfaces and widgets/tools • Evaluations by “expert users” • Using matrix of UIUC “best practices” (http://cita.disability.uiuc.edu/html-best-practices/) • Semi-monthly teleconferences (http://cita.disability.uiuc.edu/collaborate/desiretolearn/) • Collaborations using Google Apps for document sharing (http://www.google.com/a/)

25. “Consortium” model for collaboration

26. Facilitating Remote Collaboration Functional testing using UIUC “best practices” matrix on Google Apps

27. Current Status and the Future • Improvements between versions 7.4 and 8.1 • More consistency in markup of graphics (part of D2L build process) • Some improvements in naming conventions of graphics and tools • The future: Usability testing (if improvements merit)

28. Conclusions • All have many problems • All say they are trying • Much still depends on the accessibility of the content developed by faculty • We need accessibility checks as material is uploaded • Keep asking questions of the vendors • Get involved in the product selection • The Big Question: Open Source or Commercial?