Suggestions for good Accessibility Plugins

DoyceT

Hi all,

As many of you know, I'm runnning 2.1.* as an online campus for a limited-residency, mostly-online MFA program. This semester, a new student is joining the program, and she's blind.

She's already tested out the forums somewhat, and between her braille reader and a text-to-voice enabled laptop, reports that the forum seems to work fine, but I'd like to make things as smooth as possible for her going forward.

So, those of you with encyclopedic knowledge of the addons out there: are there any particularly good accessibility addons I should take a look at and/or bring to the forum before the semester gets rolling?

R_J

I would love to be helpful in that case. I've done some quick research and found that:

WAI-ARIA provides Web authors with the following:

• Roles to describe the type of widget presented, such as "menu", "treeitem", "slider", and "progressmeter"
• Roles to describe the structure of the Web page, such as headings, regions, and tables (grids)
• Properties to describe the state widgets are in, such as "checked" for a check box, or "haspopup" for a menu.
• Properties to define live regions of a page that are likely to get updates (such as stock quotes), as well as an interruption policy for those updates—for example, critical updates may be presented in an alert dialog box, and incidental updates occur within the page
• Properties for drag-and-drop that describe drag sources and drop targets
• A way to provide keyboard navigation for the Web objects and events, such as those mentioned above

If all needed information can be inserted via JS, it could be done with a plugin - even for the parts that are injected with AJAX.

If not, you'd need a custom theme for that which overrides a lot of the standard views (which would be a mess if you plan any major update).

Either way, it would be helpful to get feedback of your new student what's misbehaving and what's working.
Maybe there are tools that can be used to test a web page for its accessibility? If anybody knows one...

Linc

We've done some Section 508-compliance work on master branch since the 2.1 release you may be interested in. I'm afraid I can't lead you to what features we changed specifically, but she may have more success with it in general.

DoyceT

Thanks to both of you; very helpful and informative.

At this point, the student says she's fine with the forum as it stands, and that it is "better than I'd hoped, and much better than some I've been on", so we're at a very good starting point.

I'll take a look at the WAI-ARIA stuff in particular, to see what I can do to essentially label everything clearly on the site, but for now (at her suggestion) I'll hold off until she hits anything that presents problems.

hgtonight

@DoyceT said:

I'll take a look at the WAI-ARIA stuff in particular, to see what I can do to essentially label everything clearly on the site, but for now (at her suggestion) I'll hold off until she hits anything that presents problems.

You sound like a great admin.