[Draft] Guidelines to Make Your LMS Accessible

Why Accessibility Matters

Your current customers and potential new customers need learning management systems (LMS) that:

are accessible to instructors with disabilities
produce accessible content for students

In many situations, accessibility is required by law.

Examples

Everyone can Use Previews

Persona: Lisa is a physics professor at a large university. She is blind and uses a screen reader that reads aloud the information on her screen.

Problem: I can't preview uploaded content using my screen reader. When I select the preview, I can't navigate it as I regularly do on an HTML page.
Works well: When I select the content preview, I get an HTML view of the content, just as if I were using my browser. I can navigate it easily with my screen reader built-in functionality.

The tool itself should be accessible to instructors who have auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and visual disabilities. Users with disabilities need to be able to use your tool to do everything that users without disabilities do.

Everyone can Edit Content

Persona: John is a learning designer. He uses speech recognition software to navigate through systems and websites.

Problem: I can't format my course contents. When I say things like "bold", "italics" or "underlined", nothing happens.
Works well: I speak the format I want to use and the contents are updated accordingly.

Users have different ways of interacting with websites, systems, and digital content and might use a range of assistive technologies. When your tool supports this and is set up correctly, it enables users to interact with your LMS successfully.

Everyone can Improve Accessibility of Existing Content

Persona: Jenny is the director of a rural school.

Problem: I want to add some charts in our existing courses but I am not sure how accessible they are for our childrens with disabilities.
Works well: Whenever I add a chart to the course, I get a warning that it may require an alternative text and I get guidance on how to include it.

Support the creation of accessible content. This includes ensuring any automatically-generated content is accessible as well as helping authors fix potential accessibility issues.

The Accessibility Standard to Help You

Your learning management system (LMS) is an “authoring tool”. It can enable users to create accessible educational materials.

There is an international standard to help you meet accessibility needs: Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG). ATAG is developed by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

Use ATAG to help make your tool:

accessible to educators and course administrators with disabilities [Part A]
support accessible content for students [Part B]

ATAG covers the above examples: @@add numbers below.

Make your Tool Accessible for Users with Disabilities — “Editing views are perceivable” and “Editing views are operable”
Support alternatives to images and multimedia — “Authors are supported in producing accessible content”
Promote accessibility features and help fix accessibility issues — “Authoring tools promote and integrate their accessibility features”

To get started putting ATAG to work for you, see:

Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) Overview, with links to the ATAG standard and implementing ATAG
ATAG at a Glance, a paraphrased summary to give you an idea of what’s covered in ATAG