My college used D2L Brightspace which has very similar issues. It took the screen reader 45 minutes (I recorded it) to read through a page with nothing but the scaffolding.
Also important was how poor the experience was for attention. A task would often break down into something like 10 minutes of code, 15 minutes getting the specs from online. It took about 11 clicks from login to the page you needed for an assignment, all of which had 5+ second delays, even the 'click to click' content that was under 20 words would load from a server each time.
I brought both issues to the college's attention. The response: "This is industry standard software."
I mentioned how that doesn't change anything about it not being accessible and was offered to leave the program(not in an aggressive way).
This was the same day we went over logical fallacies.
> Where I had control, I made changes. Unnecessary labels removed. Accurate alt text added — not filed-in-for-compliance alt text, actually descriptive alt text. The heading structure was cleaned up where I could reach it. For this project's SharePoint tracking page, I rerouted entirely: instead of asking users to fight through the noise, the system now sends an email update at every stage of the approval.
seems to be the only bit of text that actually details anything that was done. I would liked to have read about the actual changes and steps taken to improve accessibility instead of some kind of low key rant about MS
While the content was interesting, the AI-slop-stench was repelling.
Talking about AI (sorry!), perhaps an AI assisted screen reader could remove repetitive elements (it appends "(read only)" to every. single. field.) in a smart fashion? Does this already exist?
We're seeing AI being used to improve a11y in quite a few places: (Live) transcripts for video conferences, image to text (VQA, visual question answering) etc.
My college used D2L Brightspace which has very similar issues. It took the screen reader 45 minutes (I recorded it) to read through a page with nothing but the scaffolding.
Also important was how poor the experience was for attention. A task would often break down into something like 10 minutes of code, 15 minutes getting the specs from online. It took about 11 clicks from login to the page you needed for an assignment, all of which had 5+ second delays, even the 'click to click' content that was under 20 words would load from a server each time.
I brought both issues to the college's attention. The response: "This is industry standard software."
I mentioned how that doesn't change anything about it not being accessible and was offered to leave the program(not in an aggressive way).
This was the same day we went over logical fallacies.
> Where I had control, I made changes. Unnecessary labels removed. Accurate alt text added — not filed-in-for-compliance alt text, actually descriptive alt text. The heading structure was cleaned up where I could reach it. For this project's SharePoint tracking page, I rerouted entirely: instead of asking users to fight through the noise, the system now sends an email update at every stage of the approval.
seems to be the only bit of text that actually details anything that was done. I would liked to have read about the actual changes and steps taken to improve accessibility instead of some kind of low key rant about MS
While the content was interesting, the AI-slop-stench was repelling.
Talking about AI (sorry!), perhaps an AI assisted screen reader could remove repetitive elements (it appends "(read only)" to every. single. field.) in a smart fashion? Does this already exist?
We're seeing AI being used to improve a11y in quite a few places: (Live) transcripts for video conferences, image to text (VQA, visual question answering) etc.
> It took 18 hours of work.
So a couple of days plus a few hours. Seems reasonable.