Forum Discussion
RISE - accessibility features
One year ago there was a discussion around accessibility - WCAG AA, WAI-ARIA Labels, Section 508, DDA, Equality Act and Screen Reader Supports.
It was noted that Articulate were working on this and that there would be further developments in this regard. Have the accessibility issues been addressed. This is important for me as I am about to develop a course and would like to use RISE rather than Storyline.
Thank you
124 Replies
Hi Paula,
While our ultimate goal is to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), we're not there yet. As we move closer towards that goal, we'll share updates in this discussion.
Hi Alyssa,
As has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, is there any chance of Articulate hosting a Rise Accessibility focused workshop/webinar to help your paying userbase understand best practices given the current state of Rise functionality? Which is to say, we understand that Rise is not 100% accessible at this moment (as an example, drag and drop will likely never be accessible), but how do we best use Rise as it stands today?
My impression is that if we (as developers) create content in Rise carefully we can actually create adequately accessible content, avoiding the use of certain features and making sure to use others properly. Now, that might not be perfectly true in the case of all screen-readers, etc., but it is likely close enough. One of the beautiful things about Rise is that, from a user perspective, all we have to do is re-open an asset and republish to once any future accessibility updates are released from Articulate. Tips like that would give us the confidence we need to continue considering Rise for development purposes.
Does Articulate have an accessibility/compliance specialist? Most of us have felt a bit like we're swimming in the dark for the past year or two. Thanks for considering.
Yes, please do this!
I think its a little bit of trial and error for us. For example, some things work well with the screenreader JAWS, but not with screenreaders that are built into the OS.
In the spirit of sharing, I would point out that there are accessible drag and drop activities out there in the wild. I made this a feature request for RISE, so I remain hopeful.
Hello,
One option I am having to do is to have an accessible PDF version of the RISE course.
The document only had a few errors in Acrobats Accessibility testing, so I'm correcting some of those issues.
Has anyone else done this for their course in order to stay compliant?
Second Option:
Another option that seems to work well is to copy all text content into a .txt file. Screen reader seems to work very well with it.
Can someone else test this and confirm?
I was actually asked this week for an accessible version of a Rise course I had developed, I exported the course as a PDF and sent this to the person requesting an accessible version and she was very happy with the results. Until Rise becomes fully accessible I am exporting older Rise courses as PDFs and then adding these as an alt version on the same course page alongside the RISE package.
Thank you!
I'm wondering if another possible workaround might be to branch off into an adapted version of the course and import storyline blocks only to ensure it's accessible? As I understand it, Storyline is fully accessible and WCAG compliant so you could just use storyline blocks in that branch of the course and it would be considered accessible? Anyone try this? Thanks!
Any success in screen reader support and what is the steps to access the blocks for Jaws screen reader, any document Articulate could provide?
Hi there, SibaPrasad. No update for screen reader support yet. We're shooting for the end of this year!
Hello Crystal, do you have an updated estimate for screenreader support?
Following. This is so important and I'm not using RISE as much as I would like to until it is addressed. Thanks to everyone who added some great ideas that will hold me over for a little bit longer.
No updates yet, Rebecca. We're still on track to have screen reader support ready by the end of this year. Thanks for checking in!
We've just started working on increasing the accessibility of our courses. Following this conversation over the past two years has:
1. Been discouraging regarding the amount of improvement coming from Articulate.
2. Been phenomenal in the amount of suggestions from USERS!
Totally agree! Very discouraging for users in the university settlng!
Best comment! Same in our projects. We wait for an improvement in ac since mid of 2018. Hopefully the update powered by Deque will come soon!
