What is Web Accessibility & WCAG 2.0?
Web accessibility is the practice of designing and developing websites, applications, and digital content that can be used by people with disabilities. This includes ensuring that people can perceive, understand, navigate, interact with, and contribute to the web.
WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It is a set of guidelines developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that provide a framework for making web content accessible to people with disabilities. WCAG covers a wide range of disabilities, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities.
Coassemble is committed to providing an inclusive learning experience to all users, and with that in mind, Coassemble was built to support WCAG. In order to ensure that your content works with WCAG, there are a number of things our users must do when creating content to ensure that content is accessible.
These include:
Adding alternative text to images so they can be read by screen readers
Ensuring your color scheme allows for good contrast
Avoiding Lesson screen types that may be difficult for some users to navigate with a screen reader or other assisted technology.
Alternative text for images
Alternative text, often referred to as 'Alt text', is used to provide a textual alternative to an image. This allows screen readers to read the description of images to visually impaired learners.
How do you add alternative text in Coassemble?
Unless your image is purely for decorative purposes (like a course or dashboard banners), Coassemble allows you to add alternative text.
To add alt text, click the edit image button, and select the ‘Alt’ option to reveal a text input.
Alt text should be concise, accurate, and convey the same information as the image. It should also be descriptive enough to convey the purpose and content of the image, without being too long or overly detailed.
Choosing an appropriate color scheme
As the learner navigation is based on your theme color, ensure you select an appropriate theme.
To meet WCAG level AA, you are required to achieve a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. There are a number of tools you can use to check the correct contrast of your foreground (font) color, and background color. A great resource for checking contrast can be found on the WebAIM website.
Choosing accessible screen types
Although all of Coassembles' screen types allow visually impaired users to navigate through them using a screen reader, we still suggest that you avoid using certain screen types if possible.
We recommend that you don't use the following screen types as they require users to be able to sight images and place labels on them:
Spot the mistake challenge
Labelling challenge.
Although we provide keyboard navigation options for the following screen types, we recommend you avoid using them because they require users to drag and drop items to locations.
Drag and drop question
Drag multiple question
Match category challenge
Match sequence question.
Keyboard navigation demonstration
Watch our Head of Engineering explain keyboard navigation and accessibility in Coassemble.