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Thread: making moodle more accessible

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Number of posts in this thread: 4 (In chronological order)

From: Susan
Date: Fri, Jan 11 2008 5:40PM
Subject: making moodle more accessible
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I have been very quiet for ages but now I need some advice and ideas. In
case anyone has not heard of it moodle is open source software used in the
world of on line learning. Some people use it as a storage place for
documents and others run complete courses with it.

I have been happily putting together a course using moodle but today I have
been told that there are problems with accessibility for such courses. Does
anyone know of the sort of issues that are likely to arise? Has anyone any
experience of making moodle more accessible?

Susan


From: John E. Brandt
Date: Fri, Jan 11 2008 6:50PM
Subject: Re: making moodle more accessible
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Susan,

What version of Moodle are you using?

The current stable branch is v1.8 which is very good in terms of
accessibility. The accessibility team is working on v1.9 now. Here is the
tracker on accessibility for 1.8 http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-7396

Good summary of all of the issue may be found here
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Accessibility - check out the discussion group for
the latest and to ask specific questions.

That said, like all CMSs, the software cannot do everything and any user can
inadvertently make content inaccessible due to a lack of knowledge and
understanding.

~j


John E. Brandt
Augusta, Maine USA
www.jebswebs.com


-----Original Message-----
From: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
[mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ] On Behalf Of Susan
Sent: Friday, January 11, 2008 7:37 PM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
Subject: [WebAIM] making moodle more accessible

I have been very quiet for ages but now I need some advice and ideas. In
case anyone has not heard of it moodle is open source software used in the
world of on line learning. Some people use it as a storage place for
documents and others run complete courses with it.

I have been happily putting together a course using moodle but today I have
been told that there are problems with accessibility for such courses. Does
anyone know of the sort of issues that are likely to arise? Has anyone any
experience of making moodle more accessible?

Susan

From: Joshue O Connor
Date: Sat, Jan 12 2008 3:40AM
Subject: Re: making moodle more accessible
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Hi Susan,

I will also be building a VLE using Moodle this year for a course NCBI
are running, so I am interested in continuing this thread and finding
out how you are getting on. Please keep us posted and feel free to get
in touch off list if you need any help.

As John has already mentioned I believe that Moodle is already pretty
good out of the box, in accessibility terms (though I will also be
fulling testing this assertion). Bear in mind that the accessibility of
Moodle aside, endevouring to make all of the materials that are used in
the VLE (teaching resources etc) accessible and available in multiple
formats will go a long way to creating a level playing field for everyone.

Good luck with it.

Josh


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From: Eoin Campbell
Date: Mon, Jan 14 2008 11:20AM
Subject: Re: making moodle more accessible
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"Susan" < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
>I have been happily putting together a course using moodle but today I have
>been told that there are problems with accessibility for such courses. Does
>anyone know of the sort of issues that are likely to arise? Has anyone any
>experience of making moodle more accessible?

Moodle 1.8 is explicitly intended to be accessible,
but it is not as accessible as I had hoped.
When I looked into it a while back, I was surprised to find that
the use of the h1, h2 and title elements is not what I expected.
- The h1 element is used as part of the site-wide banner area,
rather than a container for the title of the current page.
- The title element contains the last portion of the breadcrumb
trail text, not the real page title.
- The h2 element contains the 'real' title describing the content
of the page.

An example page showing this usage is viewable at
http://moodle.org/mod/resource/view.php?id=2322

Although I believe the Open University and Moodle teams are working
hard on accessibility, and 1.8 is certainly better than previous versions,
I wonder if some of the implementation choices they have made are
really correct from an accessibility perspective.
The maximally accessible usage of the heading and title elements
is somewhat subjective, so I suspect that the Moodle developers
have decided this usage is most appropriate, but I would
disagree with them.


That said however, the issue of the accessibility of the VLE
should be separate from the issue of the accessibility of the
course materials contained within it.

As a general principle unrelated to accessibility, I think
authors should create course materials
independently of the VLE, as SCORM-compliant
packages, and import them into Moodle, rather than create
native Moodle pages within the VLE itself.

This will allow those materials to be imported into any VLE,
not just Moodle.
From an accessibility perspective, providing SCORM
packages would allow learners without high-speed Internet
access to download a complete package and view
it offline.



--
Eoin Campbell, Technical Director, XML Workshop Ltd.
10 Greenmount Industrial Estate, Harolds Cross, Dublin, Ireland.
Phone: +353 1 4547811; fax: +353 1 4496299.
Email: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ; web: www.xmlw.ie
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