WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Creating a workaround for a online matching question

for

From: glen walker
Date: Nov 7, 2018 1:22PM

A few side-related questions:

If the existing matching activity is online, is there a reason you are not
creating an accessible online version too? While Word and PDF can be made
accessible, I find making an accessible html version much easier.

Is the word/pdf version specifically for the screen reader user or will
other users have access to it? That is, do you have a mandate to create a
word/pdf version for all users and you just want to make sure it will be
accessible to everyone?

If you use the table approach, just make sure the table column headers are
marked properly. In word, go to the table properties, then the "row" tab,
and check the "repeat as row header at the top of each page" checkbox. (Do
that for the first row of your table). If you save the word doc as pdf, it
should tag the column headers properly. I'm not aware of a way to create
row headers in word.

However, I'm not sure a table is necessarily the right object for screen
reader users. There's no correlation between the two columns, on purpose,
because the user has to match the columns, so having a table doesn't really
give you any advantage. Alternatively, just two ordered lists would be ok
too. One list could be A-D and the other could be 1-4.

If you create an accessible online version, then each A-D could be a
<label> element and each <select>/<option> could have all the 1-4 answers.
Then the user just answers each question with one of the four possible
answers.

Glen