Hi, my name is Tristan and I am currently in my final year of a software engineering degree at Sydney University. At the moment I am writing my thesis under the supervision of Rafael Calvo. In a nutshell, I am performing an accessibility study on dotLRN to see how it complies with current accessibility standards (such as the W3C WCAG).

The main goal of my thesis is to produce a set of guidelines that can be used by dotLRN developers and implementers to aid them in producing accessible pages. Any advice, critisicm, or discussion would be invaluable to me as you all know much more about dotLRN than I do and would aid me in producing useful and reliable guidelines.

I have made available my partial draft thesis for anyone who is interested in reading more about it. It can be found at:
http://www.members.optus.net/kcfamily/DotLRN/PartialThesisDraft.htm
or the .doc version:
http://www.members.optus.net/kcfamily/PartialThesisDraft.doc (3.1 MB)

Thanks for your time.
- Tristan Kalnins-Cole.

I have finished testing my default installation of DotLRN. At the moment I am compiling all the results and information into an organized format. I will list here a summary of the results until the complete version is available.

Priority 1
There are only a few issues that need to be considered, most of which are related to images and alt text (for example the spacer images have no alt text descriptions). It should be straightforward to achieve priority 1 compliance.

Priority 2
After automated testing it appeared as though there were a lot of problems at this priority level. However, after examining the code it became clear that most of the errors found were trivial (for example fixed sizes are specified for presentation line elements instead of relative sizes). Some non-trivial issues were discovered (for example a lot of form elements require explicit labels). As with priority 1, achieving priority 2 compliance appears to be straightforward.

Priority 3
This is where a large majority of the issues were discovered. A number of non-trivial changes are needed to the site in order for it to achieve priority 3 compliance. A majority of these changes are in the area of navigation (for example the need for invisible ‘skip links’ to allow users, who are accessing the site serially, to jump past link menus and areas of similar links (such as the calendar)).

So all in all it is looking very good. Considering the definitions of the priority levels (provided at the end of this post for easy reference) and that only slight modifications are needed to achieve level 1 and 2 compliance, in its current state DotLRN is very solid in terms of accessibility.

Note that the links provided in my original post are now old or non-existant. I will post links to the complete documents within a week of today.

Thanks,
-Tristan Kalnins-Cole

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From http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10
[Priority 1]
A Web content developer must satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it impossible to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint is a basic requirement for some groups to be able to use Web documents.
[Priority 2]
A Web content developer should satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will remove significant barriers to accessing Web documents.
[Priority 3]
A Web content developer may address this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it somewhat difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will improve access to Web documents.

Ok, I've completed all the documentation and uploaded it to my webspace. There are three documents:

Thesis.doc (http://www.eelab.usyd.edu.au/~tkal6763/THESIS/THESIS.doc) is my entire thesis document.

accessibility.html (http://www.eelab.usyd.edu.au/~tkal6763/THESIS/accessibility.html) is a standalone, accessible html version of the accessibility analysis document extracted from the thesis.

problem.html (http://www.eelab.usyd.edu.au/~tkal6763/THESIS/problem.html) is a standalone, accessible version of all problems found with the default installation. It links to and from the main accessibility.html page (note; at this stage the images of the problems are viewable only in the thesis document and are not available in the html version. I plan to add these soon).

I sincerely hope some of these results are useful for the DotLRN community and I would love to discuss anything regarding them (or accessibility in general).

Thanks,
- Tristan Kalnins-Cole.

I just went through your thesis Tristan. Great work. The structured problem identification and recommended followup is excellent and will certainly result in work on accessibility in an upcoming release (do not be surprised if some of the changes make it into 2.1). It is motivating to hear that we are so close level A compliance and "solid in terms of accessibility in default form". It asserts the philosophy behind the toolkit. Thank you for your contribution.

Carl,

Looks like the basics are already there: http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=95550

Great work Tristan,

As you state, the contrast aspects of pages are important considering the variety of display technologies. I believe much can be learned from the experience of publishing standards practiced with television, such as how contrast is used with captioning, subtitles, text-tv and credits.

Torben

Hey Rocael!  How about running one or more of your UI ideas past our little UAB for at least two cents of well-meaning opinion.  We'd love to be a sounding board for anyone in the design phase.  All the best,  Bruce

Hey Bruce, talking about UAB, we want to organize the UAB around the .LRN consortium and make it active, and that their suggestions comes back to .LRN releases soon. We discussed this briefly, do you have any ideas on how we can organize the UAB better?