Using the Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit to locate and repair accessibility errors in Moodle courses

New to Moodle version 3.11, the Brickfield Education Labs Accessibility Toolkit offers a quick and easy way to evaluate your course sites for common accessibility issues, and helps you fix any problems. This document will walk you through a course evaluation, and demonstrate some basic repairs.

First Steps: Setting Up

• Build your site as you normally would, including all course materials, links, etc. The Toolkit is designed to scan finished course sites, so only run the evaluation tool once you’re done with everything else.
  
• Schedule your course for evaluation. Note: This does not give anyone else access to your course site. It simply marks your site for evaluation by the Toolkit the next time the software runs. To schedule your course for evaluation:
  1. From your main course page, open the Actions menu and select Accessibility toolkit.
     
     
     
  2. You will be notified that your course is not yet been scheduled for evaluation, and receive a detailed explanation of what that evaluation entails. Click Submit for analysis.
     
     
     
  3. You will then be returned to the main page, where you will see a banner announcement that the course is scheduled for evaluation, as well as an estimated time of completion for the evaluation.
     
     
     • This banner announcement is visible only to you, not your students.
     • Time to complete the evaluation will vary, depending on the number of courses currently being evaluated, but is typically less than 15 minutes.

• Add the Accessibility Review Block to your site. While you wait for your site to be evaluated, and enabled the Accessibility Review Block.
  1. On your main course page, click Turn editing on.
     
     
     
  2. Scroll to the bottom of the left-hand navigation drawer, and click Add a block.
     
     
     
  3. In the Add a block sheet, select Accessibility review. You will be returned to your main course page, and the Accessibility Review block will be added to the page. The block can be repositioned like any other. Once your review is complete, the results will appear in the block.
     
     
     

Next Steps: Reading the Results

Once the Brickfield toolkit has reviewed your page for accessibility issues, the summary results of that review will be shown in the Accessibility Review block, as illustrated here. These results are visible only to you, the instructor, never to your students.

This summary breaks accessibility issues into 6 categories, and lists the number of errors found in each (Nota Bene: don’t be put off by the number of errors shown in the example. The demonstration course has been revised a number of times over several years, and so has accumulated a large number of accessibility issues.) At the bottom of the Accessibility Review block, you will find 3 additional functions: Toggle accessibility heatmap, View accessibility toolkit, and Download accessibility summary report.

• Download accessibility summary report will download to your device the PDF file summarizing the types of errors found, numbers of each type, and numbers of failed/passed activities based on this evaluation. Nice for documentation, but of little use in actually resolving the accessibility issues.
  
  
  
• Toggle accessibility heatmap enables a color-coded heat map of the page, with each section of content given a color background according to its pass/fail status. Additionally, content that fails the check is labeled with an error count and the percentage of all errors contained in that section. This color coding and labeling allows you to focus your efforts quickly on those sections most in need of remediation.
  
  
  
• View accessibility toolkit opens a set of tabs with a detailed review of all the errors found, with helpful information about each as well as a series of reports indicating the most common error types and locations. The most useful of these is the Error list tab.
  

Finishing Up: Correcting the Errors

Using the Accessibility Review toolkit as a guide, you could simply go activity by activity, locating each error and correcting them manually. But if you have more than a few things to correct, this quickly becomes tedious. Fortunately, the Accessibility toolkit’s Error list tab makes this much less difficult. Each listing contains data about an error, including the activity where it was located, what check was failed, the HTML code in question, what line of code the error occurs on, and a direct link to the error so you can edit it quickly.

From the listing in the illustration, we can see that our demonstration course has an error on the top course page. We need to swap out bold tags with the more screen-reader-friendly strong tag in line 1 of the code for that content. Here’s how you do it:

1. Click the Edit link to the far right of listing for the error to jump directly to the edit settings page for that content.
   
   
   
2. At the top left of the text editor toolbar, click the Show more buttons button to expand the toolbar.
   
   
   
3. From the additional buttons that appear, locating click the HTML toggle to switch to code view. Locate the offending tag in line 1 of the code, and change it.
   
   
   
   
4. Click the HTML toggle again and verify that the change took effect, then click Save changes. Note when you return to the Accessibility toolkit Error list, the error you just fixed will still be listed. The error listings are not updated in real time, but rather every 5 minutes when the software runs. So it may take a few minutes for your changes to be reflected.

More Information

For more information about using the Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit with your Moodle course, or about accessibility issues in general, contact Davidson's Digital Learning group, or contact our User Success group at ti@davidson.edu.