screen readers and course formats and lists - oh my!

screen readers and course formats and lists - oh my!

by Stuart Lamour -
Number of replies: 1
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If you're using a screen reader to view a moodle course you'll find something quite odd :

Every label, activity or resource is indicated to be a separate list item. 

For a sighted user this isn't an issue - content on the screen appears to flow, just like on a normal website, with no indication its a bunch of separate items unless you're editing.

For a screen reader user a label e.g. Course Reading - is separated from the resources/activities it actually refers to sad

There is no advantage to a screen reader of the course html list structure -  in testing with screen reader users it proved a barrier to navigation and understanding the course content structure, not an aid.

For sighted user the underlying dom/html list structure is overwritten with css to not look like a list - which is just unnecessary code where more appropriate html elements are available.

Historically i believe this all used to be tables in moodle, and was converted into lists at some point in the past, with css to make it not look like a list....?


Moving forward we should probably just be using divs for label/resource/activity containers as most other websites do.

These days we also have the article element - http://html5doctor.com/the-article-element/ - to group content that belongs together like a moodle section/topic or week.


Anyway, just thought i'd post this here - interested to hear others thoughts/experiences around this strange choice of dom structure/html elements in moodle course formats.

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In reply to Stuart Lamour

Re: screen readers and course formats and lists - oh my!

by Gareth J Barnard -
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Hi Stuart,

If you believe that the code is wrong - change it.  Raise a tracker, submit the changes along with a test plan, get it peer reviewed.....and make a difference.  Nothing was ever achieved by moaning about it.

There is no 'why'.  Moodle is old and decisions made in the past on how things were done are based upon the knowledge known at the time.  Things have moved on.  And when old code is recognised to be out of date then it needs to be improved for the very reasons the new knowledge justifies.

Gareth

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