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 IllinoisChampaign/Urbana
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”
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)
Visual Impairments
 Screen readers can render
well formatted pages well
 See an example at
http://www.doit.wisc.edu/access
ibility/video/intro.asp
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
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
Cognitive Disability
 Professor who struggles with reading comprehension
understands much better through listening
 Professor listens to websites through a screen reader like
Kurzweil
Sakai
Mike Elledge
Sakai Accessibility Elements
 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
Annotated
Screenshot
Go to
Accessibility
Information (h1)
Jump to
Worksites
(h1)
(h2)
Jump to
Content
(h1)
(h3)
Jump to
Tools
(h1)
“Sort by
Audience”
(h4)
(h4)
“Table contains a
list of
announcements.”
(s)
(x)
Label
for / id
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
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”)
WebCT
Kostas Yfanis
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/
Illinois Compass Home
Sample Course
Accessibility Issues
Existing Challenges
 Pop-up windows
 Java applets
 Missing headers & image
labels
 Others:
http://www.cita.uiuc.edu/coll
aborate/webct/problems.php
Improvements
 Heading structure
 Added alt text for images
 Expanded labels for form
controls
 Language definitions
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
Desire To Learn (D2L)
Joe Wheaton
and
Ken Petri
D2L Class Page (v. 7.4)
2 Frames, No Headings
Fangs Add-on for Firefox
OSU’s Web Accessibility Center
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-bestpractices/)
 Semi-monthly teleconferences (http://cita.disability.uiuc.edu/collaborate/desiretolearn/)
 Collaborations using Google Apps for document sharing (http://www.google.com/a/)
“Consortium” model for
collaboration
Facilitating Remote Collaboration
Functional testing using UIUC “best practices” matrix on Google
Apps
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)
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?