Introduction
Description of Course and Landmarks
Supplementary materials
Video Walkthrough Example
Welcome to the NROC Developmental English Player - Accessibility Guide. This guide explains how to navigate the player using screen readers. You should read this guide before launching the player in order to understand the structure of the course and the screen reader technology to use. We recommend using the Chrome browser from Google and installing the ChromeVox extension. This setup works best with our player. We do test other screen readers, such as NVDA and Jaws but have found that ChromeVox works the best.
Before you launch the player, it is helpful to understand the structure of the course. Each player represents 1 unit of the Developmental English course. Each unit begins on the Unit Home screen. The Unit Home screen has content summarizing what the unit is about, a main menu, a global menu that is accessible from every screen, and some extra information that includes notifications. Wherever possible, we have set up landmarks to make groupings of navigable elements easier to get to. On simple screens like dialog boxes, we avoid landmarks since the navigation is fairly simple. Following is a description of each screen in the player, starting with the Unit Home screen. Generally, you can use landmark navigation to jump to groups of items, and once a landmark is selected you can tab to the child items. The entire player can be navigated with tab, arrow keys, and either space or enter as an action key.
The main menu includes 7 items. Several of those items are video presentations and share the same user interface navigation. Here is a description of the various items you can jump to from the main menu.
In addition to the 7 menu items, there are a few global items accessible throughout the player. Instead of describing these on every screen, here's a succinct list of globally available items.
All presentations include the global navigation elements plus one new Main Landmark (NROC Video Player) which includes these items for controlling video.
Some presentations include interactive exercises that pop up over the player at certain timecodes within the video. These include one or more questions to answer about the video and are saved to "My Journal". There are no landmarks on these exercises, they are simply a vertical list of questions. Tab through the items. Each starts with instructions, followed by a sequence of questions. Possible question types are:
After completing all of the questions, tab to the "save to my journal" button and the button should be enabled assuming you answered all of the questions. Focus will return to the video. At the end of the video, a dialog pops up with choices to replay the video or continue to the next section of the unit.
The active reader includes several pages of a reading divided into succinct chunks. Also, there are "lenses" to the side that alter the format of the reading.
The review is a quiz with a collection of questions. Each question works just like the Interactive Exercises, so see the previous section for notes on how questions work. In addition to the questions, there is some special navigation in the Review. The Review occurs in 3 main steps: introduction, questions, summary. Each question provides feedback after answering. If you get a question wrong, you get 1 opportunity to answer the question again. Many questions include a reading passage required to answer the question. The summary screen provides statistics about your results and may provide additional materials you should study. The tab order throughout the review is very linear and doesn't really require additional explanation.
Resources include instructions and 3 groups of resources: PDF, Video, and Text. The Text resources include a search feature.
It's important to note that the search feature does not "call out" results to you. Type the text you are searching for, then tab down to the list to see what it found.
My Journal is divided into two sections: Notes and Annotations. Notes includes all of your exercise responses from the presentations. The responses may be edited. Also, there is a place for free-form notes at the bottom. Mostly this screen works with linear tabbing. There is a button to toggle to the Annotations and a button to close the Journal.
The Annotations section is a full view of the Active Reader pages all in one document and you are free to annotate it just like the Annotation questions. There is a button to switch to the Notes and one to close the Journal. Once you tab to the reading you can annotate it. These have been improved and you may now just press enter when the entire text is in focus. This method only allows for one comment for the entire document but is easier than trying to select text with a screen reader.
The Writing Center takes you through the process of writing a document. There are 7 steps in this process.
Except for the workshop screens, every screen starts with an instruction dialog and ends with a confirmation dialog to submit your work. Here are some landmarks that are used at various phases of the process.
There are a few items in the Active Reader lenses that are difficult to make accessible. These materials are provided as simple HTML pages at the following links:
If you would like to watch a video walkthrough of the player's accessibility support click the link. Video Demonstration
Note: since this video was recorded, there have been some improvements including: