HUGE Accessbility Update!

Announcements
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HUGE Accessbility Update!
Wed 25 January 2023

Today’s Evolve release contains significant improvements to the accessibility of Evolve Courses. Details from the release notes can be found below. Huge respect to the Evolve dev team for tackling 30 reported accessibility requests and innovations from the latest guidelines.

Our next step is to have an accessibility audit on the tool and a course certified, which will allow us to include an in-app indicator showing you which Components are accessible.

We’d like to thank everyone who asks questions, reports issues and makes suggestions regarding improving our tool both for accessibility and in general - we really do listen and act, and together we make Evolve even better for everyone.

Here are some of the highlights:

Internal Navigation - screen reader focus works correctly when navigating using Footer Navigation, internal links to other locations within a course, when using the Bookmarking Extension and whenever an action changes focus within a Course.

Show Answer Button in Question Components - now when you activate the Show Answer button with a screen reader, you will hear the correct answers read out. Marking icons are now recognized and read by screen readers.

Tab Component - keyboard navigation allows you to move between tabs with the arrow keys and the component mirrors the W3 best practice example of a tabbed interaction.

Improvements have been made to the Survey, Linked Confidence Slider, Linked Open Input, Number Input, Text Area, Text Input, Select, Checkbox Group, Radio Group, and Slider Input Components.

Keyboard Focus - when you have a Course Focus Outline Color set in the theme, it will only appear when navigating via keyboard, only be visible on interactive elements, and will not be visible when navigating the Course with a mouse.

Read our latest Blog Post for more

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This is fantastic news, Helen. Thank you for sharing and a huge thank you to the development team for working on these. They will make a difference.

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Great news - thanks for the update Helen and thanks to the rest of the team for all the hard work!

I know this was a big update but is there any log of the 30+ issues? The blog seems to read the same as the update at the moment.

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Hi @Ruppers I will aim to provide a more lengthy breakdown of the work at some point soon. Thanks for the interest.
-Sam

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Hi @Sam_Cook_Evolve_PO I’d love to see the list too.

I was at a whole department event yesterday and I mentioned the big update to lots of people. Your team were commended for the hard work you put in to address issues and provide fixes.

Keep up the good work.

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@BarryBPS That’s great to hear, thanks for sharing.
Cheers-Sam

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Great news, thanks everyone! While it’s worth celebrating these latest updates, I don’t see a broader statement about what this says for Evolve’s accessibility overall. Would you say this brings all components and the overall tool to a level of “compliance” with WAI recommendations, is there still more work to do? We’re doing an internal audit of our tech platforms to try to establish standards for accessibility of the eLearning content we produce with Evolve, and it’d be nice to have a succinct document that summarizes the areas where it’s fully compliant and areas where there’s still a way to go.
Thanks!
Ted

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hi @tedcurran thanks for the comment, apologies in delay in getting back to you, was on holiday.

To answer your questions - what we are hoping to have at some point in the not too distant future:
-a course available for users that has been certified as accessible by an independent third party that contains all the components and extensions that are accessible

  • an indicator in Evolve that shows you which components and extensions can be used for accessible courses. It won’t be every component and extension, but it’s the majority of them.

I will update this thread with more information regarding timescales for these being available when I have it.

In terms of whether there is more work to do - the short answer is yes! We will always be making updates to Evolve to improve the accessibility, they regularly appear in our updates. Keep an eye on the release notes for the updates to see what fixes are included. Accessibility is very important to us and a big part of what we do.

If you ever have any specific queries please feel free to post them here, and if you think you have found a bug or an improvement we can make please raise a support ticket with us. Thanks - Sam

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