.LRN Accessibility

From quite a long time .LRN community has been moving towards producing both accessible interfaces and services for all. Accessibility analysis on previous releases have been done such as Tristan Kalnins-Cole's under Dorian Peter's (dotLRN Director of Visual Design) supervision. This lead to the unofficial conclusion that version 2.1.3 was level A compliant.

Selva theme was designed to make easier the customization of the look and feel of .LRN, improving navigation and usability. Moreover, unlike other .LRN templates, it is strongly based on CSS. Therefore, it can be easily seen that Selva theme was a step forward in considering accessibility issues.

During the development of version 2.2.0 we have been working to assure that .LRN 2.2.0 with Selva theme is compliant at least with W3C WAI WCAG 1.0 level A. In this sense, three new categories of bugs have been created in the Bug Tracker and are being used to report problems regarding accessibility. So far, within the framework of several R&D projects in which aDeNu Research Group at UNED is involved, we have compiled several accessibility analysis performed by some of our partners (Soluziona) and research groups within UNED to translate the problems found at different development stages to .LRN/OpenACS bugs and discuss them in the .LRN IRC Tuesday meetings. "This work has led to the release of .LRN 2.2.0 as W3C WAI WCAG 1.0 level A compliant, except for LORS package (there is a strong incompatibility between the SCORM RTE and WCAG 1.0, which is to be solved with WCAG 2.0). Moreover, there may be some minor level A bugs reported found here, which are to be solved."

The planning for next version is to achieve WC3 WAI WCAG level AA and take into account, when available, specific guidelines from national regulations such as the American Section 508, UK SENDA, Australian DDA, German BITV or Italian Stanca. Our plans are to consider WCAG 2.0 as soon as they are officially released as well as other WAI documents (e.g. ATAG and UAAG).

In order to improve the accessibility quality of dotLRN, we ask you to use W3C Web Content Accessibility bug types to report any problems encountered so they are taking into account when developing.

Update for dotLRN 2.3

See Zen project and external evaluations on Educational packages [1], [2].

Information on the progress is also done in periodic dotLRN/OpenACS conferences:

• Fall 2006
  • Session Towards full Accessibility in LMS
• Spring 2007
  • Improving Accessibility, Usability, and Code Quality of .LRN and OpenACS: The .LRN Zen Project [3]
  • Workshop on Experiences on Accessible eLearning Platforms

Last modified: 2008-08-12 11:16:08.396471+02