Accessibility catalog

[rjfoster03]

I have several online tutorials created Toolbook 11.5 that need to be updated to become accessibility compliant.

I have found online the "steps" to access the Accessibility Catalog (View, Options, Catalogs, Location). When the general Catalog is opened within Toolbook, I do not see any mention of Accessibility or any ready to use objects to choose from (that would provide accessibility displaying).

I wanted to see if anyone had any experience with accessibility and Toolbook.

[Clifton]

To get a little thread going on this important subject:

What purpose or group of individuals are you attempting to reach with special accessibility features? Many modern web browsers already employ screen readers, etc. However, I myself am not too up on these things without a particular need to do research.

[rjfoster03]

The hybrid course (half online and half in the classroom) went through our peer review process and as part of the process, ADA accessibility is addressed. Within this course, Alt text for images was the main issue, but looking ahead into one of my other courses, I see a lot of accessibility issues that will be flagged.

The upcoming pathology and anatomy courses have numerous tutorials that have been created over the years. Links within our LMS must also follow accessibility rules and this is where the issue will be. Any images will have to have Alt text associated with them, so I have started on this aspect. The bigger issue for me will be the handling of Menu buttons, navigation buttons and hotwords. The tutorials have been updated to Toolbook 11.5, are all online for accessibility and of course are mouse driven.

From what I have learned, navigational buttons, menu buttons and hotwords need to be accessible through the use of a keyboard.

Although I teach within a dental program and a student that has a visual impairment or even worse, no use of their hands, will most likely never enter our programs. For accessibility matters, the use of the keyboard must still be addressed.

I wanted to see if anyone had any suggestions on how to make keyboard accessibility a possibility. I did a search within the Knowledge Base and found the Accessibility Catalog, but it seems to not be of any help with regards to coming up with a plan of making the required buttons/hotwords accessible.

[Clifton]

Here are some features of the PowerPac that may help you:

1. Use userProperty() to set the "alt" attribute on load page for accessibility objects that do not convert well from ToolBook.
2. Use userProperty() to set the "title" attribute of any object requiring accessibility tooltips. These can even be made dynamic by running this function again with different "title" attributes.
3. The PowerPac can load an entire page dynamically from an XML file. This may be a viable option for setting up accessibility templates. There is currently little documentation on the XML configuration methods, but I would be glad to assist or provide consultation on setting up a template. XML files a text-based files that you can read and load into your course pages using the XMLHttpRequest() function. Nearly our entire PowerPac Help API manual is loaded as ToolBook templates with XML data files.