Hi Andy,

I have been working towards making Totara more accessible. There have been large strides with each major release being considerably more accessible than the previous one (and 9.0 will be no exception). On an automated scan of a basic test site running 2.9.4, 214 pages of the 4898 (4%) scanned had an accessibility issue (according section 508). Most of these issues fall into the following categories:

• Image alt text matches file name. I do not believe this is a genuine issue as these are both descriptions of the image. With the introduction of font icons in Totara 9, these will largely avoided.
• Object tags should contain alternative content. In most circumstances this is the file browser which has the type text/html, which is what browsers are designed to display.
• Web pages must not contain any images that flash more than 3 times a second. Most of these are related to to the file upload interface, and this can be resolved by replacing fp/dnd_arrow in your theme. Others are the smiley emoticons (which can also be replaced in the theme).
• Redirections. There are a number of times where Totara redirects a page request (some times for security purposes) after a given time (usually 3 seconds), this may cause screen readers to be interrupted. There are ongoing discussions on how we can best solve this. 

Given how large and complex as Totara is, there is likely that there will always be some issues and I will be ensuring issue is fixed as I become aware of them (depending on the nature of the issue, the solution may only be available in the next major release due to the likelihood of breaking themes). By all means, feel free to raise helpdesk tickets for any accessibility issues that you discover.

Kind Regards,

Brian Barnes