[WG: Accessibility] MORE > Re: Sakai accessibility

[Richwine, Brian L]

I too have many questions. It would be great if we could get some specifics so we can more easily benefit from this feedback.

I am concerned about the comment that Sakai lacks the ability to navigate by headings, sections, or other navigational level and am wondering what the gap is between what Sakai presents and the expectations. I'm also curious where the main navigation links were missing - do they mean the tools list that the portal presents for a given worksite? There definitely are many inconsistencies between tools, and I wonder if this contributes to the clunkiness they report. Makes me curious about how D2L and Moodle are designed.

The way in which tools respond the back button is confusing and inconsistent. In some cases, the back button will take you back to the previous tool, other times it takes you back to the previous tool state (probably the expected behaviour, and therefore desirable), other cases the tool blanks out, and in some cases, nothing happens. The reset tool icon probably isn't what the user wants most of the time as it throws away any work that is in progress, so it isn't a substitute.

Most of our accessibility testing (at least of late) is performed by people who are very familiar with Sakai, and so know a lot about how to use Sakai and what to expect. The user experience for a person new to Sakai is obviously going to be much different than ours. This falls into something a bit different than straight up accessibility testing and more towards usability testing with the persona of adaptive technology users who are new to Sakai.

I wonder if we could arrange a phone conversation with the colleague who performed the testing. I sure am interested in learning as much as we can from this contact.

-Brian

From: accessibility-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:accessibility-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of Eli Cochran
Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 2010 5:50 PM
To: Eli Cochran
Cc: David Loberg Code; accessibility at collab.sakaiproject.org WG
Subject: [WG: Accessibility] MORE > Re: Sakai accessibility

I'm going to respond to my own response.

On rereading the review, I feel that I should respond a little more strongly in our favor. While I'm sure that the reviewer is accurately describing his experience, it doesn't jive with our own reviews or reviews by others done of the last couple of years. So I'm very interested in knowing more about the review and the protocol used.

Thanks,
Eli

On Aug 4, 2010, at 1:55 PM, Eli Cochran wrote:


Hi David,
Thanks for your email, sorry for the delay in reply.

While I think that this is an honest and fair assessment of the accessibility of Sakai, I'm curious as to which version of Sakai was being reviewed and which tools the reviewer chose to focus on. Some tools are definitely more accessible than others especially in the navigation. And we've done a significant amount of work in Sakai 2.7 to improve Sakai's accessibility.

In our own reviews and reviews by others, Sakai's accessibility is usually described pretty favorably. Sakai is mostly usable by people with disabilities and it's getting better with each release. There are a couple places, especially around rich text editing (an especially tricky area to make accessible) where we know that we have some work to do.

If you can send me the particulars, I'll log them as bugs in our issue database.

I've cc'd the Sakai Accessibility Working Group to see if anyone else in the group would like to respond. If you have any specific questions, please feel free to email the group.

Thanks,
Eli

On Aug 2, 2010, at 3:24 PM, David Loberg Code wrote:


We are selecting a new LMS at Western Michigan University.
A colleague of mine performed accessibility tests for some potential LMS systems.
Below are their comments regarding Sakai.

Do you have any comments or insights you might have regarding their review?

thanks,

david

As requested, I performed an accessibility review of Sakai using both screen reading and
screen enlargement programs.

The following access technology programs were used for my evaluation:

Jaws For Windows (JAWS) screen reading program
WindowEyes screen reading program
ZoomText screen enlargement program
Magic screen enlargement program

Note: 2 areas that were not evaluated were the accessibility features
used to view streaming content and the ability to download materials
from the websites. Both of the evaluation sites did not have sample
streaming video or audio content nor were there any documents
available for download. These are 2 major areas that the Blackboard
program lacked accessibility in and are a major issue that I
personally found while taking courses through the Distance Education
Program.

Sakai Evaluation

This program was the least accessible of all those I evaluated, in
comparison to the Moodle and Desire2Learn programs.

The Sakai program had the following accessibility issues:

The layout was very difficult to understand and navigate using a
screen reader. The program lacked the ability to navigate within html
elements by headings, sections, or other navigational level. This
requires a user to rely upon the use of the keyboard arrow keys to
"view" the entire content of the html page. This is a very tedious
method of navigation and is very slow.

Not all graphical links were titled properly and I had to open the
link, go to the next page, and see where the link took me.

In a couple of situations, using a screen reader, I was unable to back
up to a previous page and had to go back to the Homepage and then
navigate back to where I previously was. This was very frustrating and
time consuming.

The main navigation links changed depending on which page I was on.
Normally, each page will have the "main" links at the top of a page to
allow to move from one main subject, such as the home page, course
content, or other links, readily available to allow for quick
navigation to the subject area desired. This was not the case in all
areas of the Sakai website.

I appreciate the "open source" design of the program to allow for
quick changes and/or modifications to the program but have ran across
issues where "open-source" changes were not evaluated for
accessibility prior to being implemented. This may cause a program to
be unuseable for someone using access technologies until the issue can
be corrected. This could have a very detrimental effect on students
who are working under very strict timelines.

Finally, as I mentioned earlier, the layout was "clunky" and had a
much larger "learning-curve" than the layout in the D2L program.


david

David Loberg Code
School of Music
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, MI 49008
code at wmich.edu<mailto:code at wmich.edu>

. . . . . . . . . . .  .  .   .    .      .         .              .                     .

Eli Cochran
manager of user experience design
user interaction developer
Educational Technology Services, UC Berkeley

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
    - Antoine De Saint-Exupery









. . . . . . . . . . .  .  .   .    .      .         .              .                     .

Eli Cochran
manager of user experience
user interaction developer
ETS, UC Berkeley

"Do not solve the problem that's asked of you. It's almost always the wrong problem."
    - Don Norman





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