We had an interesting demo session today in TLP; we took some Disabled Student Services folks on a students-view tour of typically used features in the Vista LMS. We were fortunate enough to have one staff member use her screen reader as well. And lo and behold, we uncovered numerous areas where this application couldn’t even pass Priority 1 accessibility tests.
Skip to Content links are a great idea, but what’s the point of using them (but only occasionally) if they come AFTER about 30 top frame and navigation menu links? In one screen, the skip to content link enabled the user to skip just one nav link.
The Chat applet simply said “Java Applet” and left it at that. Not so useful. I’m not expecting a description of the whiteboard, but we’re talking about text chat. This shouldn’t be like pulling teeth after 5 or 6 years of public standards.
We did get some decent results in other areas. Obviously, the Vista technology gives us easy pedagogical solutions for students who need more time for tests, etc.
Resizing text and applying high-contrast colors was a snap. Even better on the Macintosh, where Tiger can force the entire graphics subsystem into high-contrast modes. When adding graphics content to a course, it’s extremely easy to define alt-tags. It gets harder later, though.
But overall, it seems like these vendors are checking with technology instead of humans. As if they don’t WANT to know that it’s unusable, as long as it’s legal to sell to government-sponsored entitites.
Can you enshrine “usability” in a law? We need to.