Moodle and accessibility

Moodle and accessibility

HND Group -
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We are a group of students from an HND Computing and Internet Technology course at Yeovil College in the UK, and as part of our final project have decided to develop an intranet for the higher education college network and we have decided to use Moodle. Here in the UK, websites to be used by students in a college have to follow the Special Educational Needs Disability Act (SENDA), and we would like to know what measures have been taken to ensure Moodle is suitable for people with special needs? Would Moodle work on devices like touch screens and screen readers? Could Moodle be navigated with a head pointer, rather than a mouse?

 

Documentation regarding SENDA can be found here.

Many thanks,

Laura Challis

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回复HND Group

Re: Moodle and accessibility

Martin Dougiamas -
Core developers的头像 Documentation writers的头像 Moodle HQ的头像 Particularly helpful Moodlers的头像 Plugin developers的头像 Testers的头像
I would obviously like Moodle to be as accessible as possible.

My layout design technique incorporates simplicity and a general awareness of page rendering order, as well as using ALT images where possible, so it should be fairly good, but I haven't conciously conformed to any particular accessibility criteria such as SENDA, Section 508, WAI etc, nor has it ever been tested on screen readers as far as I know. There are some plans for XHTML-compliance in the near future which may help.

One way your group could help this project is to perform an audit and report back here with your findings, highlighting specific things that could be done to improve accessibility.
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回复Martin Dougiamas

Re: Moodle and accessibility

Sean Keogh -
We are concerned about accessibility too, and as a test I tried accessing our moodle site using the "lynx" and "links" text mode web browsers.

It *was* possible to use most of the site sucessfully in pure text mode, so I would guess that screen readers would not have much of a problem. The only bit that I haven't manage to get to work so far is submitting quizzes, because of the javascript check at the end, which the text mode browsers don't support.

I'll report back with other findings when I have them.
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回复Sean Keogh

Re: Moodle and accessibility

Adam Cripps -
I've also sat up to the latest laws in the UK about accessibility.

I looked in to Jaws as a text reader, and used it to test some websites. Going from memory, it basically doesn't have a problem, until you hit frames, and then it only reads one, until the user navigates to the next. It isn't always clear when there is more than one frame.

Looking at some parts of moodle, there was a frame, which I stumbled on. This could be replaced with includes, which PHP does quite nicely.
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