Community Feedback on Poodll Accessibility?

Community Feedback on Poodll Accessibility?

by Robin Sitten -
Number of replies: 3

Our program is considering the Poodll Plug-ins, and one critical requirement we have of our coursework is accessibility. I am interested in the community's feedback on Poodll's usability and functions for people who are visually or hearing impaired. Putting aside the complications of audio and video assignments and feedback for a moment (we know we have a lot of work to help class members and instructors provide accessible content for each other), please comment on the usability of the tools themselves.

From the videos I am seen of Poodll in action the buttons and links appear as accessible or inaccessible as any other Moodle module.  Do you or your users report a different experience?


Thanks for your thoughts.

Robin Sitten

Perkins eLearning

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In reply to Robin Sitten

Re: Community Feedback on Poodll Accessibility?

by Justin Hunt -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

Robin, it would be interesting indeed to see what others have to say on this. 

But I have to say that it is probably not the best news. I battled for some time to make the buttons visible to screen readers and in the end found that it was not going to work ... because of limitations of the framework I originally wrote the recorders in. Though it did not occur to me then, since that time I have found a way around those limitations and have implemented it in one of the recorders. Basically by hiding the flash widget and handling all user interaction via html buttons and javascript a far more accessible interface can be made. Effectively we are introducing skinning to PoodLL. It is just a matter of finding the time, to get it all done.

But accessibility goes beyond just screen readers, so any comments or advice would be welcome.

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In reply to Robin Sitten

Re: Community Feedback on Poodll Accessibility?

by Nora Colazzo -

Hi Robin,

I was just browsing information about Poodll on Moodle.or and found your post and one other which didn't seem to address the issue.

I've been working on Poodll in Moodle 2.8 and found that this plugin is not accessible. When I ran the NVDA screen reader and also sent a sample to our disability officer which is blind, he was unable to detect the player. The screen reader bypasses this alltogether.

I will be sending a request to the developers to review this plug in and help us to comply with WCAG 2.0. 

Cheers,

Nora Colazzo

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In reply to Nora Colazzo

Re: Community Feedback on Poodll Accessibility?

by Justin Hunt -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

You are right that much of it is not accessible. Luckily its not far away for the most popular of the components however.

I was able to introduce full skinning for the MP3 audio recorder last month, thanks to "The Learning Factory" in Brazil. That makes adding accessibility to the MP3 recorder relatively simple. The other recorders require similar work, but at least we have a pattern to go with.  

The part that is not simple in all this for me, is exactly what the normal/desired behaviour of an screen reader, especially when it encounters an audio recorder. I was quite puzzled when I was testing with JAWS previously. 

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