Prioritising accessibility of sorting and matching activities
Oct 06, 2023
Hi Articulate and the eLearning Heroes community,
Although many positive steps have been made towards better accessibility across Articulate 360 products in recent years, one remaining issue is the challenge for learners with screen readers to use the sorting and matching activity types in Rise. From searching the community archive, this is something that has been requested for quite some time with little progress made.
Whilst some of the other developments on Articulate's Feature Roadmap (https://articulate.com/support/article/Articulate-360-Feature-Roadmap) are no doubt worthwhile, making sure existing tools are fit for purpose when it comes to accessibility is essential. Notably, developments related to accessibility now no longer appear on the roadmap at all, and a recent support request confirmed that "we can't provide a timeline or commit to a date when matching drag-and-drop questions and sorting activities become fully accessible".
This is quite disappointing, especially when the most recent Accessibility Conformance Report (March 2023, https://articulate.com/support/article/Rise-360-Accessibility-Conformance-Report-VPAT) states "We’re working on these block types now".
Therefore, it would be helpful to understand what work is being undertaken to resolve this issue and if/when a fix can be expected.
Many thanks.
3 Replies
Hi there, IPC Classification!
Thanks for checking in and sharing your thoughts on accessibility for matching drag-and-drop questions and sorting activities.
We know how crucial this is for so many learners. Right now, this is still in development and we don't have a timeline or a specific date.
We appreciate your patience while we work through this. This thread will be updated as soon as we have more information.
In the meantime, you'll also find updates in our accessibility journey. In this link, you will find our latest updates --- we fixed Animation from Interactions, Theme Contrast Control, and made the Cover Photo Text more readable.
Thanks for your reply, Hazel.
One thing I noticed is that in the recent WCAG 2.2 update (October 2023, https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/new-in-22/#257-dragging-movements-aa), for any action that involves dragging, a a simple pointer alternative is now required. This would apply to both the drag-and-drop and sorting activities, therefore, for Rise to be AA compliant, this would be need to be in place.
Please consider this a priority for your development schedule.
I am in the end stages of completing a mandatory piece of training for a healthcare organisation of 7000+ staff, the course is around inclusion, I started using rise with the knowledge this was being worked on and would likely be resolved prior to launch. I won't be able to launch the course in it's current state due to these elements not being in place. Please can you provide a timeline of updates for when all element will be accessible in Rise 360?