[d2l-consortium] March 23, 2007 D2L Accessibility Interest Group minutes, next meeting

[Ken Petri]

Notes on the March 23, 2007, D2L Accessibility Interest Group teleconference.

Next teleconference:
Time: 2 PM EST
Where: 614-247-6424, id number: 0490#

Agenda:
* Continued discussion of evaluation matrixes.
* Timeline for implementation at D2L
* Follow up on ideas for either "Birds of a Feather" or some special
meeting at UC07 or an "after the conference" virtual panel discussion.

Summary of Last Teleconference

The teleconference was held from 2 to 3 PM, Friday, March 23. We got
cut off by the OSU teleconference system at about 3:10 PM.

Attending were Janna Cameron (D2L), Mark Felix (U. of Arizona), and
Ken Petri (OSU).

Most of the meeting was spent reviewing Ken's and Mark's progress in
the matrix evaluations. Mark has done extensive review of the
Competencies tools and pages. Ken had mostly completed review of the
"Course Home" page and sub-pages. For next week (this Friday), Ken
will have completed that work and worked through a majority of the
"widgets" in version 8.2. Mark was kind enough to take on review of
the "Discussions" implementation.

Significantly, D2L is using headings liberally within their markup.
Though this is a relatively small thing from the perspective of
page-level code changes, this is huge in terms of improving page
navigation for screen reader users. Headings not only seemed
appropriately placed, they were very well thought out in terms of the
text presented in them. For example, in the Competencies, one could
get a generally good idea of what "view" on the tool was being
accessed by moving through the list of headings. So, not only did you
know that you were "in" competencies, you could also get a good sense
of *where* in the many pages of competencies you were currently
located.

This breaks down somewhat as you dig into some of the deeper levels of
Competencies. Currently, there is no way for a screen reader user to
tell what sub-view you are in by reading the page-level menu system.
The elements in the system highlight with yellow backgrounds. But
there is nothing to indicated "selected" to the screen reader user.
Mark suggested making the headings that introduce that portion of the
page more specific to each view. Ken suggested also adding the word
"selected" to the label in the menu (this could be hidden with CSS, of
course).

We also looked at the new JavaScript enabled expanding tree menu.
After any single parent item has been activated (expanded or
collapsed), the + and - clickable toggles have their image alt
attributes populated with either "collapsed" or "expanded." This is an
improvement from the previous implementation.

However, there are two problems: First, when the page with tree
widgets on it loads, the alts are not initially set. So the screen
reader hears the name of the image--something like "img/cl_1"--read
aloud. As soon as he activates--collapses or expands--the tree, the
proper "row collapsed" or "row expanded" is populated and the graphic
becomes interpretable. Until then, it's gobbledygook.

Also, we might question *what* has been expanded or collapsed. At a
minimum, "section expanded" is more descriptive than "row expanded."
But much better would be some context. For example, "unit one options
expanded" would be better.

Additionally, Ken pointed out that the nested options, which are all
labeled with roman numerals (i. ii. iii. iv., etc.) are neither
interpreted as real numbers by screen readers--which read aloud "e"
"ee" "eee" "ehv", etc.--nor are they nested lists, at the level of the
code. Instead, the nested items are table rows. Far better would be
using semantically appropriate ordered lists. The code for the
expanding lists should be something like:

<ol class="tree-level-zero">
  <li>Unit One
    <ol class="tree-level-one">
      <li>sub item</li>
      <li>sub item</li>
     </ol>
  </li>
</ol>

Then the numbering could be styled via CSS:

ol.tree-level-one {
  list-style-type: lower-roman;
}

Thank you to participants and to D2L for continuing moving forward
with this process.

Best,
ken
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  Ken Petri
  Director, OSU Web Accessibility Center
  102 Pomerene Hall
  1760 Neil Avenue
  Columbus, Ohio  43210
  (614) 292-1760
  mailto:petri.1 at osu.edu
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