Best practice forum (Archived)

Does Totara LMS meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0?

 
Ira Felinski
Does Totara LMS meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0?
by Ira Felinski - Sunday, 4 May 2014, 10:57 PM
 

Hi,

Do any of the latest Totara LMS versions meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0?

If so to what level (A, AA, etc)?

Thanks,

-Ira

Ciaran Irvine (Core Developer)
Re: Does Totara LMS meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0?
by Ciaran Irvine (Core Developer) - Monday, 5 May 2014, 10:33 PM
 

Hi Ira,

This issue has started to come up regularly over the last few weeks so it is definitely becoming a priority for us. We have also recently received some reports on accessibility compliance which highlighted some issues that need to be resolved.

In the poll for requested features for 2.6, this issue actually polled quite poorly! We'll be doing a similar exercise for 2.7 shortly now that 2.6 is released so the more votes for this the more of a priority it will be, so keep an eye out for that 2.7 poll.

https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=19000

As you can see from that we estimated that fixing most of the accessibility issues would take about 25 developer days so it would be a significant effort, though we do intend to continuously improve our accessibility support moving towards 2.7.

Moodle are also taking Accessibility more seriously and have some open tickets themselves and of course those patches when released will be merged into Totara:

http://docs.moodle.org/26/en/Accessibility

http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Accessibility

In a related forum post from a year ago there is a good study comparing Blackboard, D2L, Sakai and Moodle for accessibility and Moodle does pretty well:  https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=2808 though obviously there is always room for improvement!

If you happen to know of any reputable assessment or official accreditation agencies which could do an analysis of a Totara installation for WCAG Compliance we'd be happy to work with you in getting more reports, identifying issues and improving our WCAG/508 accessibility compliance as much as possible.

A Eisenberg
Re: Does Totara LMS meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0?
by Alan Eisenberg - Friday, 9 May 2014, 10:05 AM
 

Hi, I thought I would add that we are required to provide VPAT and 508 compliance to our clients. On that note I have testing software that also does test for WCAG compliance. Moodle tests very well for 508 compliance and Totara is doing well, also, but there are some points that need fixing. I have discussed this with Jonathan Neumann at Totara and know that we also need to see this issue addressed so we can truly give an accessible website to our clients as required, without the need to go into the code ourselves to fix it.

Alan