Hi everyone,
I hope you are having a good start of the week.
I am aware that the Branched scenario component is not accessible. I have just tested a video-branched scenario with the screen reader. I was able to go through the whole branched scenario with no issues. I disabled timing and enabled video control. What else could I do to make this fully accessible? Is there a vital point that I am missing for accessibility?
OK so, with components that are labelled as ‘not accessible’ it’s a little bit of a grey area with some of them. It’s really more that it has ‘not been certified as being accessible’. The ones we have had certified are the ones where we are confident that pretty much any way you configure them they will be both keyboard and screenreader accessible to at least Level AA.
For the others there are some which can be made either partly or completely accessible, depending on how you set them up - and equally there are others which are just never going to be accessible, the Simulation component probably being the most obvious example*
The Branching component is an excellent example of one that probably can be configured so that it is accessible but which:
We’d love to be able to give more of a steer on this in the documentation, it’s just a case of it being quite a lot of work to get that together and to explain it in a way that’s easy to understand.
We also hope to be able to get more components & extensions certified as accessible over time. But for this initial phase of work we really wanted to focus on those we felt most confident about so that we could get the list of those that definitely are accessible out as soon as possible. We managed to get 56 out of 80 components/extensions successfully certified, which I think is an excellent start - but definitely not the end of the journey!
So with regards to your specific question about the accessibility of your branching component setup - I would say if you’ve tested it and you’re happy that it’s going to work for your learners then it probably is fine. I would say you should probably make sure you’ve tested it in a range of screenreaders, we do tend to find that VoiceOver generally seems to be the most robust, then Jaws and Windows Narrator, with NVDA generally being the one that is the most problematic/fussy/buggy.
Hope this helps!
* equally there are others that are difficult to categorise: for example with the iframe component it would entirely dependent on what content you display in it, so it’s totally out of our control as to whether it is accessible or not, therefore we cannot say definitively that it is. Or the Image Slider component, which is set up to be keyboard and screen reader compatible. But given the nature of the component, it’s probably not one we’d recommend you include in a course that needs to be accessible to screen readers!
Hi Matt.
Thank you so much for explaining in such a lovely and thorough way.
What about the Interactive video - I have only tested partially. Would you say it is a similar case with it?
Thanks a bunch!
It’s been a while since we checked it properly - but from what I can see the last time we did I’d say: yes, it is a similar case.
That’s no problem at all!