We have increased support for a number of major screen reader tools that are free. We think Accessible content should be available to all and not cost.
Published Evolve 4 content supports the following screen readers:
When using tab to navigate a course it may help to change the colour of the outline of items which have been tabbed to. This is now possible in Evolve 4.
Extended Aria label support
Aria label support allows course developers to customise what content screen readers read out and gives much greater control when developing accessible eLearning content.
We’ve extended Aria label support across the following Extensions, Menus and Components.
There has been an accessibility release since this FAQ. Does that mean Evolve is now compliant with these standards – so long as content creators adhere to good practice, etc.?
We have increased support for a number of major screen reader tools that are free. We think Accessible content should be available to all and not cost.
Published Evolve 4 content supports the following screen readers:
When using tab to navigate a course it may help to change the colour of the outline of items which have been tabbed to. This is now possible in Evolve 4.
Extended Aria label support
Aria label support allows course developers to customise what content screen readers read out and gives much greater control when developing accessible eLearning content.
We’ve extended Aria label support across the following Extensions, Menus and Components.
Our clients use it, but we haven’t tested it. If you find any issues please let us know. Evolve Content is compliant so if it works with one tool it should work with all, unless that tool is not following the compliance or has specific requirements not in the specification.
JAWS is widely used but we wanted Evolve to work with as many inclusive free tools as possible, so we haven’t looked specifically at individual companies with paid options.
Something that puzzles me is, since NVDA, and indeed most screen readers read out the HTML text anyway, what happens when that text has also been added as ARIA labels? In experimenting with this, the screen reader reads the screen content twice if the ARIA labels have been filled.
This isn’t ideal, so I wondered what your advice would be. When should you fill in the ARIA label fields and when should you leave them blank.
This is subjective and entirely down to editor choice.
ARIA labels are great for describing what is coming next to a screen reader. Often the common mistake is to fill out the ARIA label the same text as the title. It will just read this out twice because it’s the same text. I rarely recommend filling out Aria labels for things like the text component.
Where ARIA labels are useful is for things like Flip Cards. Filling out the ARIA label with something like ‘There are 4 objects to interact with, which will reveal more text when interacted with’. This tells the end user that they have to actually do something to read out the text on the other side. This is also good to have in an ARIA label as this might be different to instructional text, which would normally be something like ‘Flip over each card’ - This wouldn’t make a lot of sense someone visually impaired, as they don’t know how many things to flip over, or where the interactivity ends.
Indeed, Evolve will instruct the screen reader to skip this content if it doesn’t have an Aria label filled out - Make sure you check the help text on the ARIA labels for certain interactions.
We’ve recently run into some issues with JAWS screen reader and ARIA labels, specifically on Mozilla. Just seeing if this is on the roadmap to be supported? Or, if there are any workarounds in the mean time?