[Using Sakai] Sakai unusable by blind student

[Diego del Blanco Orobitg]

Hi Marilyn:

I'm not expert at all in accessibility, but this that you are commenting is
very important.
I don't know what images, the user is finding with the alphanumeric code
becuase most of the images in Sakai Skin have a normal name... maybe these
images has been uploaded by the instructors that created the content. Or
maybe they are Sakai images.

Anyway, some time ago, for one customer I had, we designed a patch to allow
select the skin by user, so a user can have a different skin and view the
platform in other way. We did some skins with high contrast and bigger size
of the letters. Maybe this idea can go beyond that, and if we were able to
to create a skin with a very simplified interface without any images that
worked better for the screen readers, and assign it to people that needs
that, it would make things easier for all.

Review all the sakai images and change the name for something more
descritptive and add an "alt" on them surely is something that can be done
too and I think it won't need a lot of work.

In the other hand, again, one thing is Sakai interface and other is the
content that the teacher uploads. Maybe a way to make mandatory the "alt"
field when a teacher uploads an image, or/and, some education for the
instructors when they create the contents or questions, can help too.

About the first solution I proposed some time ago to change skin when you
enter with a parameter in the URL,...
https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/KNL-860  but this was not introduced
in the main code. It's an option. I'd like more another option to allow to
you, as a user, to select your own skin in preferences. So we can have
skins for screen readers, high contrast skins, big fonts skins... or any
other thing that helps the people with accessibility problems.

I propose the accessibility group to think about this. I think that Sakai,
with the new Morpheus skin, has an opportunity to improve this question.

Diego




2015-03-20 6:35 GMT-07:00 Marilyn Dispensa <mdispensa at ithaca.edu>:

>  Hi everyone,
>
>
>  A blind student on campus has been sharing his experiences with various
> technologies.  He says Sakai is extremely difficult to use and has the
> disability office take content from Sakai site and deliver to him
> separately.  I didn't get much specifics but when using JAWS he says there
> are many images that have a long alphanumeric file name and unless he
> memorizes those numbers, he can't navigate. He said it took 3 hours to take
> a 12 question quiz.
>
>
>  I've noticed that Sakai Project has accessibility efforts
> https://sakaiproject.org/accessibility
>
> And the wiki actually talked a bout
>
>
>  T
> <https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=82250209>here
> also seems to be an accessibility working group.
>
>
> https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/2ACC/Accessibility+Working+Group
> ​
>
> It seems like there is some testing done, but it is unclear about the
> completeness of that effort.
>
>
>  I'm curious if anyone has any experience with Sakai and actual visually
> impaired students. If he agrees, I might try to record his experience and
> share it  with the community.
>
> Maybe there is a user issue or maybe there's a way to go on this.
>
> Marilyn
>
>
>   --------------------------------------
> Marilyn Dispensa
> Instructional Technology Coordinator
> Information Technology Services
> Ithaca College
> 953 Danby Road
> Ithaca, NY
> 607-274-3647
> mdispensa at ithaca.edu
> http://www.ithaca.edu/its/iss
> @indispenzable
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> sakai-user mailing list
> sakai-user at collab.sakaiproject.org
> http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/sakai-user
>
> TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send email to
> sakai-user-unsubscribe at collab.sakaiproject.org with a subject of
> "unsubscribe"
>



-- 
*Diego del Blanco Orobitg*
Spain & LATAM Regional Manager (*ANI Sakai <http://www.anisakai.es/>*)
Apereo LATAM Representative (*Apereo Foundation <http://www.apereo.org/>*)

Ph: +1-480-521-8527
Em: ddelblanco at anisakai.com
Sk: ddelblanco.ani
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/sakai-user/attachments/20150320/f981cbcc/attachment.html