Accessibility in Rise

Dec 01, 2016

Hi,

As mentioned on the website under FAQ for Rise "Are Rise courses compliant with accessibility guidelines?
Rise employs many modern web standards for accessibility, and additional accessibility improvements are in development."

Could you please specify in detail which of these are supported in current version:
WCAG AA, WAI-ARIA Labels, Section 508, DDA, Equality Act and Screen Reader Supports.

Thanks
Mayuresh

342 Replies
VPF Training 2

One thing I'm coming across currently during course development - tables. It would be great if Rise could include a Table block so that we can create tables within Rise. I'm currently inserting an image with a table, but that's terrible from an accessibility standpoint because there's no way for a screen reader to get the text in the table. There's too much info to put into alt text (and since I already have a caption, I can't do that anyways).

Thanks!

Steve Flowers

Hi Jessica. I agree. Have run into this a few times. One potential workaround is adding as a Storyline block but that's not going to be read quite the same way and it's a lot of steps. Tab highlights do enter the Storyline published block.

I added a few tables using this method earlier this week. One of the things you'll notice about this is the amount of space at the top of the table. Even with the player removed, it seems to want to display a little extra space at the top.

Gemma Cynric-Veldey

It's true that you can use tables for webpages as long as they are simplified and formatted correctly, but this doesn't really work in Storyline since it's in a pre-published package. My webmaster could probably edit the source file code, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to do that! I don't get a lot of tables from SMEs, but the few times I've been given one to work with, I try to break up the information into small chunks and put them on individual slides. That way if a screen reader tabs through the slide, it will read the information in order. Or I try to think of some other way to present information cleanly on a single slide.

Steve Flowers

There is a way to add tables inside of Rise but it's super-hacky. Couple of cautions:

1) There is no guarantee that your tables won't go up in a puff of smoke with a future update. 

2) You need to edit your table HTML in an editor that won't overwrite your inline attributes. You also can't copy and paste tables in directly and retain all of your table styling.  It's probably a good idea to keep all of your table source edits in a file you can save locally. That way if something happens or you need to create a new template block, you don't need to recreate all of your changes in Rise.

3) Don't go 100% wide. It's wider than the block element in Rise. 600px or so seems to work pretty well.

4) If you change your block type, your changes will probably be swept away.

Here are the steps to making this work. I used Chrome but you should be able to make this work using any modern browser:

1) Add a text block. Type something into the block like "Table Hack". 

2) Select the text and right-click. Select Inspect Element.  This will highlight the element in the developer tools in Chrome. 

3) Right click the paragraph element that is highlighted and select Edit as HTML. Select the text you added, mine was "Table Hack" and paste in your table code over the top of the text but within the table element. I built up the table code below quickly in an editor. Note that your width should be set. I set the cellspacing and border to 0. I also manually set the widths of my columns. If you want nice breathable cells, you'll need to add padding to the paragraph as the styling won't stick at the cell level.  Avoid inline style attributes. Looks like those are being stripped out.

4) Select another element in the html inspector. This will lock in your table. You will see it reflected in Rise. 

5) VERY IMPORTANT. If you preview at this point, your change will be lost. Hover over the block and click edit. Then close the edit drawer. Your change is now part of the Rise block. You can edit within the blocks with any of the text formatting tools available to a normal paragraph.

Why this works. Because the editor takes what's within a specific element and saves it to the database, any changes you make to that will also be saved. While the editor itself doesn't want to cooperate for tables, using the developer tools does. Whenever an edit is made, the change is pushed through whatever save mechanism has been applied and the table is saved into Rise. It's not completely faithful. So you'll need to play with the elements and style tags that work and aren't swept out on a save.

<table width="600px" cellspacing="0px" border="0px">
<colgroup>
<col width="33%" />
<col width="33%" />
<col width="33%" />
</colgroup>
<tr bgcolor="#e8e8e8">
<td ><p style="padding:15px;">TEST</p></td>
<td ><p style="padding:15px;">TEST</p></td>
<td ><p style="padding:15px;">TEST</p></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td ><p style="padding:15px;">TEST</p></td>
<td ><p style="padding:15px;">TEST</p></td>
<td ><p style="padding:15px;">TEST</p></td>
</tr>
</table>
Agnieszka Gorgon

Hello Ashley,

We recently conducted a short accessibility audit of a course published in Rise, and here's the video of our tester's experience. The course was published prior to the recent update, and was tested using Jaws on IE browser. 

Please feel free to share it with the development team. 

Agnieszka Gorgon

I'm glad you found the video helpful. I work for Seneca Libraries, and we do the tests a couple of times a year. The tester in the video is a student in the School of Information and Communication Tech - he's not only an expert assistive tech user, but is also able to recommend solutions as to how navigation could be fixed. We are very lucky to have him work with us. Accessibility audits are an incredibly important part of the overall development workflow. 

Dearne Willing

I contacted Articulate support today to see if Rise courses fully support screen readers yet. Unfortunately I couldn't be given a date so all the organisational courses I've created in Rise I now need to change to Storyline.

From what I have read Storyline fully supports screen readers, is that correct?