Accessibility

Accessibility

by Frances Bell -
Number of replies: 3

On the Collaboration Across Borders project, we are developing tutor and student networks on a moodle test server, and hope to move to a production server in September. Moodle is turning out very well for us, and we hope to become part of the wider moodle community in the coming months.

I have searched the forums, and can see that the next version of moodle will deal with additional accessibility issues, but I wanted to ask two questions.

1. Will these changes include ALT text for the user icon, meaning text to explain the little flower on top LHS of this message?

2. Has any moodler produced any guidance for contributors to their moodle sites, to help them use moodle features to produce content with maximum accessibility?  We'd like to build on existing good practice, and are of course happy to share the guidance we produce.

I have seen references to content/summary, and possible replacement of HTML editor, but nothing that answers my question.

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In reply to Frances Bell

Re: Accessibility

by David Scotson -

In answer to your first question, it is sometimes appropriate to leave alt text empty. The user icon is (I believe) one of those cases, as the user's name is the only useful textual replacement for the image, and the icon is usually accompanied by that information anyway.

The entire subject of accessible images and various related concerns are covered in depth by Chapter 6 of Joe Clark's Building Accessible Websites, which you can read on-line.

In particular the section about half-way down entitled Identical alt and subsequent words covers the situation of user icons..

Warning: I believe there is a reference and link to an adult site in that chapter.

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In reply to David Scotson

Re: Accessibility

by Frances Bell -

Thanks for that suggestion and the link to Joe Clark's stuff.

Now I may be mistaken but when I viewed source for the page with my message above, I didn't think that the icon image was next to my name.

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In reply to Frances Bell

Re: Accessibility

by David Scotson -

I'm not 100% sure what you mean, but remember that the HTML source is just a set of instructions for the browser. Things can be at the opposite ends of the source code and still be displayed together, particularly when table layouts are involved.

Many screen readers for the blind and some text browsers take account of table position in order to faithfully translate the intended meaning of pages that have been designed only for those who are looking at the page and are able to follow the visual cues of horizontally aligned text (and images).

If an alt text was added to the user icons then something like the following would be seen (or heard):

[alt text for image] Re: Accessibility
by Frances Bell - Monday, 9 August 2004, 11:33 PM

so if the user's name was used as alt text it would be quite repetitive:

Posted by Frances Bell Re: Accessibility
by Frances Bell - Monday, 9 August 2004, 11:33 PM
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