Accessibility

Hi, Mario!

Thanks for reaching out, and apologies for the late reply. 

To answer your questions:

Have you tested Moodle’s accessibility specifically with blind users?

Moodle LMS and other products, such as Moodle Workplace and Moodle App, are developed to meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA standards. We conduct an annual accessibility audit of our products with an external provider to ensure they are as accessible as possible. The accessibility audit is performed by a team of accessibility testers with varying disabilities, including visual impairments.

About real-world users, one notable organisation that comes to mind is Vision Forward Association. They provide assistive technology training for visually impaired individuals through their Moodle-powered learning platform, "Tech Connect." We also published a feature article about them on our site last year. Please feel free to reach out to them as well.

Is Moodle fully usable with screen readers and keyboard navigation in real learning situations?

As a learning platform, we develop Moodle with accessibility in mind. However, the accessibility of the actual learning material will depend on the learning content creator's ability to create accessible content.

Are there any known limitations or areas that require additional configuration or plugins?

While we strive to develop our core Moodle products as accessible as possible and provide accessible coding guidelines to the developer community, we do not control the accessibility of third-party Moodle plugins. If you use a certain Moodle plugin on your Moodle site and find it has accessibility issues, you will need to report them to the plugin maintainer.

• Which screen readers do they commonly use (JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, TalkBack, etc.)?
• Are there particular browser or device combinations that work best?

We test Moodle LMS and Workplace on JAWS, NVDA, and VoiceOver. The Moodle App has been tested to work with VoiceOver and TalkBack. Feel free to check out our documentation about Screen reader testing for more information.

Any recommended best practices for course design to improve accessibility?

Moodle provides built-in tools to evaluate the accessibility of course content through the editor's "Accessibility checker" and the built-in Accessibility toolkit.

We also have a free Accessible Teaching Basics course in Moodle Academy to help educators design accessible courses.

I hope these help answer your questions.

Cheers!

HI Mario,

Moodle itself as Jun pointed out, gets regularly tested and re-certified. So its all the content, themes and plugins that can impact it.

I  wanted to answer your post especially on recommended best practices, but it was getting so long that I did a new blog post instead "Tips for Designing Moodle Courses That Work for Screen Reader Users (and Everyone Else)"

On your other points:

It does seem that Windows 11, Microsoft Edge,  NVDA is starting to be most common our Brickfield team have come across when working with clients. Some of the surveys hint in that direction too. Although, more and more users are listening to the page content via Readspeaker or browser features, and on mobile with SIRI.

Hope the blog post and answers help!

Gav.