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Re: - Guide to navigating Canvas LMS with a screen reader- does anybody have one?

for

From: Hayman, Douglass
Date: Aug 18, 2023 2:39PM

Brian,

I was helping someone a few months back with keyboard navigation as he was missing messages sent via Canvas. On navigating around with NVDA to see what problems he might have been encountering I found the interface performed poorly over what you might get with say Microsoft Outlook. One could navigate to a message but not get focus upon it. Finally a colleague pointed out using the "," which I hadn't used before.

We reached out to Instructure to ask this same question and they offered up

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Resource-Documents/Canvas-Keyboard-Shortcuts/ta-p/387069

on pressing that we got reply like "we can't offer help for each assistive technology out there" or something thoughtless like that. Wasn't asking for that but was thinking that it would be helpful to have the interface be more usable with common web accessibility coding like ARIA landmarks, proper heading structure, not using shortcut keys that interfere with common ones used by AT and so on.

They then offered up a look at a beta of that inbox/messaging part of Canvas which was even worse.

I'd be willing to show you my ok, not expert navigation methods with NVDA via Zoom if you like.

Doug Hayman
IT Accessibility Coordinator
Information Technology
Olympic College
<EMAIL REMOVED>
(360) 475-7632