[Athen] ALEKS and Accessibility

[Lund (AU), Beth]

Gaeir,

I have been living and breathing ALEKS accessibility the last couple of months. We are currently using the ALEKS math program in at least two of our math courses.  McGraw-Hill has made an effort to make the program more accessible, but there is still a lot more ground to be covered. I have attached some information they have sent us in our review regarding their efforts.  One of the many issues is that the changes they made to ALEKS for accessibility only allows about 65% of the problem sets available to be accessible. It also requires JAW 13, which can be problematic for our students who are using JAWS 12.  I attached some of the information that has been provided in our review for context.

There are two accessible settings (for a small percent of the courses they offer), one of which is to flag an individual student. In this setting any non-accessible items will have a warning that the problem requires a human guide for assistance. This setting also does not allow for access to certain features such as the dictionary, message center, class forum, or calculator.  All of which other students who are not flagged as needing assistance would have access to.

The last issue that I have found for our University is that they have embedded the course materials in the platform in a way that is not accessible at all by keyboard or by a screen reader. This is probably because of how it is programmed, but it is pretty useless regardless.

I reviewed a similar course by Pearson and they have a HTML version of their text book and it was accessible through JAWS 12 and Math Player. They also included a good library of videos (that are captioned) that seems to do a good job of explaining concepts. I did not test to see if they had similar a similar math lab like ALEKS.

Good Luck!


Beth Lund/ Technology Accessibility Specialist
Ashford University / Technology Changes Everything(tm)
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From: athen-list-bounces at mailman2.u.washington.edu [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman2.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Gunderson, Jon R
Sent: Tuesday, January 07, 2014 8:51 AM
To: gdietrich at htctu.net; Access Technology Higher Education Network; 'Alternate Media'
Subject: RE: [Athen] ALEKS and Accessibility

One of the main issue when I looked at in the past that most of the interactive math modules were written in Java as java Applets.

Obviously that is not strategically sustainable on the web.  I know they have an interest in MathML, and wanted to move in that direction.

Do not know of their progress.

Jon



From: athen-list-bounces at mailman2.u.washington.edu<mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman2.u.washington.edu> [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman2.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Gaeir Dietrich
Sent: Monday, January 6, 2014 6:45 PM
To: 'Alternate Media'
Cc: 'Access Technology Higher Education Network'
Subject: [Athen] ALEKS and Accessibility

Hi all!

I have a call scheduled in a couple of days with a representative from the ALEKS math program. My understanding is that there are accessibility issues with the program, but I have not personnel used it. Can any of you speak to your experiences with ALEKS and accessibility?

Thank you!!

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Gaeir (rhymes with "fire") Dietrich
High Tech Center Training Unit of the
California Community Colleges
De Anza College, Cupertino, CA
www.htctu.net<http://www.htctu.net/>
408-996-6047

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^


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