These are great conversations to have on this list – even though the really technical bits might end up elsewhere.

Even if not everyone on this list understand the conversation, the fact they know they’re taking place and leading to potential improvements is important.

It means we can point relevant people in our own organisations to problem-solving rather than just to problems.

Keep us in touch if you end up with new themes or helpful workarounds.

Thanks

Alistair

Alistair McNaught
Subject specialist - accessibility

M 07443984111
Skype alistair_techdis
Twitter @alistairm
One Castlepark,
Tower Hill, Bristol, BS2 0JA

jisc.ac.uk

At Jisc we work flexibly - so whilst it suits me to email now, I do not expect a response or action outside of your own working hours. Also, please note I use voice recognition. It can introduce creative (but entirely erroneous) interpretations. Apologies if I failed to spot any.

From: Digital accessibility regulations for education <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Tubman, Philip
Sent: 25 February 2019 10:20
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Moodle Headings

Hi Mark,

Thanks for all this info. I’m also doing some accessibility tests on Moodle (v. 3.5.4 for info) using the AXE chrome browser plugin. Our theme closely follows Boost, and I’ve been checking the issues that arise on &theme=boost also. Most apply.

Without submitting a bunch of tracker issues etc. that may be false positives or red herrings (I’m aware none of these ‘tools’ is close to perfect) do you think the Moodle technical UK list is a fair place to have a conversation around these issues.

I’ll give you an example or two here:

Participants page/ "No filters applied"	Elements must only use allowed ARIA attributes // ARIA attribute is not allowed: aria-multiselectable="true"
Participants page/ "i" (info) button	Buttons must have discernible text

Most of the issues are things like this – ie discernable text, or ARIA attributes….

Phil

From: Digital accessibility regulations for education <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Mark Chaney <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: Digital accessibility regulations for education <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Monday, 25 February 2019 at 09:16
To: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Moodle Headings

Hi Rod,

Are you, or any members of your team, members of the Jisc Moodle Mailing lists (specifically the Moodle-technical one: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=MOODLE-TECHNICAL-UK, that I am the owner of? - apologies if you have posted here and that I havent seen it). Those on that list may be able to help, though I also give some advice and ask further information below. As well as the Moodle JISC mailing lists, have you posted on the Moodle.org forums (https://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=5) - You may have, I just may have missed it?

A few questions: It looks like you are using the Topics course format, is this the same for all course formats? Is this a theme that you have written, or a 3rd party from Moodle.org (or other)? If you used a standard theme, such as Boost, do the same Accessibility issues present themselves? Generally you may be looking at changing the theme to add custom 'renderers' (https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Output_renderers), however, as its such a basic Accessibility issues that everyone who uses these parts of Moodle would benefit from, I would suggest trying to get a higher level of change:

If these issues present themselves with Boost (core Moodle theme) and with topics format (core Moodle course format) - Then its going to be a core problem, and the Accessibility group (linked to by Allistair) is your best bet (that and raising a tracker directly with Moodle.org and posting on their forums) - All Moodle users would benefit from this.
If the issues do not present themselves when you use Boost, but do when you use your theme, then its a theme issue - which case I would suggest contacting the theme developers, or looking at custom renderers.
If its not the topics course format, and these issues do not appear with the standard topics course format, then its the course format issue. Again you may want to contact the developer, or look at renderers again.

Note: Some parts of Moodle still dont use renderers at all, and in some places the H2 really is still hardcoded. At that point it really is a core Moodle bug - tracker and forums for that.

Apologies if these are really simple questions and debug steps, you may well have gone through them already? Happy to discuss of list.

Note to self: Now going to go away and test our custome theme.

Mark

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Mark Chaney
Teaching & Learning Systems Team Leader, acting Service Manager & Business Analyst

Teaching & Learning Systems, UIS Build & Development Division, University of Cambridge

Tel: 01223 (7)60909
Email: [log in to unmask]

7JJ Thomson Avenue
Cambridge
CB3 0RB

From: Digital accessibility regulations for education <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Abi James <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 22 February 2019 15:42
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Moodle Headings

Hi Rod

Thanks for raising this! I can’t assist with the Moodle questions but can give some advice from an accessibility point of view based on the standards and user testing/projects I’ve been involved with. I would say the priority is addressing the missing H1 and then that heading levels don’t jump inconsistently i.e. if you section level headings were H4 and then has a number of H3 embedded within the section which isn’t the case here.

A really useful tool for monitoring headings structure is the HeadingsMap extension for FireFox or Chrome https://www.learningapps.co.uk/moodle/xertetoolkits/play.php?template_id=1309

You don’t mention if there are any regions or landmarks within the page. These could be used to disguise the block headings links into a navigation region and each section. There is some great advice on these at https://dequeuniversity.com/assets/html/jquery-summit/html5/slides/landmarks.html. In practice, screen reader users rely much more on headings than regions but they do provide a secondary technique to fall back on when headings don’t work as expected.

Best wishes

Abi

From: Digital accessibility regulations for education <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Rod Cullen
Sent: 22 February 2019 14:19
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Moodle Headings

Dear Colleagues,

We are currently doing some work here at MMU in response to the new Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

One of the main things we are doing is looking at the accessibility of our current Moodle theme – specifically we are trying to ensure that the basic Heading structure on Course pages makes sense to anyone using a screen reader. We wondered if any Moodle users might be able to advise us on the following.

We have been using both WAVE (plugin to Google Chrome) and NVDA (open source screen reader) to investigate the basic Heading structure of the current Moodle Theme. The following screen shot of WAVE is annotated to show the issues we have found.

cid:image001.png@01D4CABF.5FFA7200

Based on our current understanding and some experimentation with both WAVE and the NVDA we believe we should aiming to implement the following heading structure.

cid:image002.jpg@01D4CABF.5FFA7200

The above seems to have a sensible and logical structure that would be easy to follow using appropriate keyboard short cuts in a screen reader.

However, we are finding it really difficult to implement <h2> tags for Section headings. These seems to be “hard” coded to <h3>. Furthermore, we don’t not seem to be able to detect a <h2> tag on the course page using WAVE or NVDA screen reader. Given that the ATTO text editor formats large headings at <h3> it is difficult to understand why week/topic section headings should also be <h3>.

We be really grateful if Moodle users could advise us on either

How to change section headings to <h2>
Why section headings should be <h3> from an accessibility perspective and what headings structure we should actually be aiming to implement

We would be very gratefully.

Best wishes,

Rod

Dr Rod Cullen | Manchester Metropolitan University

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Manchester Metropolitan University | 6 Great Marlborough Street | Manchester, M1 5AL | United Kingdom | mmu.ac.uk

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