IU and Michigan are pausing their initiative to use OAE, so they can re-evaluate their involvement. No one knows precisely why this is occurring.
For IU we were told to wind down activities related to OAE.
Joe presented at the conference regarding the work that the WG collaborated on.
He added all the issues found during the review, adding 76 new Jira tickets.
He took all the open Jiras and prioritized them in terms of accessibility issues with blocker/critical levels first, then major, and finally minor.
That will conclude Joe’s work in OAE.
Brian and Joe suggested other people will need to volunteer to become the accessibility OAE lead. The Accessibility WG could still focus on OAE, as long as a new accessibility lead for OAE can be found.
So IU will focus efforts on 2.9 and delve deeper into accessibility issues in Oncourse, the IU-customized version.
OAE 1.3 was released on June 1, right before the conference.
1.4 has been touted as a release targeting performance enhancements, but because of concerns about accessibility, some of the resolved issues maybe been moved into the 1.4 release.
Sakai CLE Updates
Gonzalo has been focusing on CLE. He has poured a lot of energy into critical accessibility issues.
The Add and Action menus have been a challenge for screen reader users to operate, so this is one of the issues Gonzalo has focused on.
jQuery UI library claimed to be accessible, but it was never complete, So a configuration was created manually.
It was not keyboard accessible and lacked ARIA markup.
A student made it keyboard accessible and made a branch. It was such a heavy requirement because of inheriting an entire library that it was cumbersome to work with.
Brian ended up going back and added ARIA atributes to what was there and he coded an interaction javascript handler to make the menus work.
Mary tested with JAWS. Brian tested keyboard accessibility. The visual appearance seems to be fine.
But we don’t know if it will work with VoiceOver.
Scott will look at it.
Brian would like to write up a little document on how to get to it. It would only be in the nightly versions.
Gonzalo marked it verified because there must be a push for beta 6 to come out.
So we need to make a good QA effort when the group decides to reevaluate these CLE tools.
There are significant changes in its visual appearance.
NeoPortal has been changed, and in doing that, some of the changes Gonzalo made got lost.
We are really going to have to start from scratch doing accessibility review once NeoPortal comes out.
Currently site navigation in NeoPortal causes difficulties for screen reader users because of an incomplete ARIA markup job.
The user Presence feature also needs to be re-checked for accessibility because of the changes made.
There is an opportunity to get fixes in through July. If there is a particular tool that should be focused on for review, there is an opportunity to do so this month.
Sakai Conference
Both sessions Brian and Joe presented - one an update on Sakai OAE, and the other a BOF session with adaptive technology demos - were well attended. There were a lot of good questions.
Brian got the chance to sit down and work with Charles Hecric. Went through ten or fifteen different issues with lesson builder. He put some fixes in so when they come out with the new beta, Lesson Builder will be fairly accessible. He kept a lot of the user interactions designed with accessibility in mind.
Brian also got together with some people from the CLE release team. talked about User Presence and NeoPortal issues with them.