[Athen] Moodle and Jaws - tip sheets?

[Zentz, Marlene]

From: Page, Aaron 
Sent: Monday, September 28, 2015 10:31 AM
To: 'athen-list-bounces at mailman13.u.washington.edu' <athen-list-bounces at mailman13.u.washington.edu>
Subject: RE: [Athen] Moodle and Jaws - tip sheets?

Hi Maria,

I am a JAWS user and have worked quite a bit with Moodle here at the University of Montana. I am unaware of any Moodle & JAWS Tip Sheets, but here are a few tips/recommendations I can provide for using Moodle with JAWS. 

1. Use Internet Explorer - Firefox works too but IE has a few advantages when using JAWS. Most JAWS users are more familiar with IE as well.    
2.  Make sure you are running JAWS 16 with the latest software updates. - JAWS 16 introduced support for reading math content displayed in Moodle (and created using Moodle's equation editor) when using Internet Explorer. To check simply open JAWS (Insert+J) and navigate to Help > Check for Updates.
3. Make sure the Convenient OCR Add-in for JAWS has been installed. Convenient OCR is a useful feature for dealing with scanned, image-only PDFs since it allows JAWS itself to OCR and read the scanned document. To use Convenient OCR simply open the file you would like to scan and press Insert+Spacebar, then the letter O. JAWS will announce "OCR" at which time you can press S  (scans single page) or D (scans entire document). If Convenient OCR is not installed JAWS will announce an error. As with all OCR tools, the result quality will vary depending on the quality of the source file.  
4. Make sure Atto is selected as the student's text editor. It is possible to use TinyMCE with JAWS, but I found it so difficult/awkward that I used the "Plain Text Area" option until Atto was released. To switch editors open the students profile (login to Moodle and click their name), click "Edit Profile", then "Expand All", and in the "Text Editor" drop-down select "Atto HTML Editor". (Note: Depending on your version of Moodle you might not have Atto) 5. Enable Audio Notifications for Pop-ups. From the "Edit Profile" page click on "Messaging" in the administrative block. Check the box for "beep when pop-up notification is displayed" then click the "Update Profile" button.
6. If your institution doesn't have it already, get the Advanced Forums Moodle plugin installed into your instance of Moodle. its free and is far more accessible than standard Moodle forums. - https://moodle.org/plugins/view/mod_hsuforum
7. Navigating Moodle is going to vary a bit depending on the way the course has been setup. Some Moodle themes provide more structure than others, and most instructors do not add additional structure beyond Moodle's defaults. Try to use headings ("H" or "Insert+F6) to help navigate around the course, but for courses or pages that may have no structure in the content area there will always be a "Main" region surrounding it. Use the "R" shortcut key to navigate by region, moving focus to the "Main Region" will always put you at the start of the content area - a good place to begin a say-all from or to begin arrowing down to read the content.  
 
I also disabled the Acrobat Reader plug-in in my browser, because I have found it to be easier to work with PDFs in the stand-alone Acrobat Reader application compared to the Acrobat plugin. This makes it so the browser will prompt to open/save the file rather than viewing it in the browser. 

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. 

Regards,
Aaron M. Page
Student Accessibility Specialist
UMOnline - University of Montana
Aaron.page at mso.umt.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: athen-list [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman13.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Maria Bohn
Sent: Monday, September 28, 2015 8:01 AM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network <athen-list at u.washington.edu>
Subject: [Athen] Moodle and Jaws - tip sheets?
Importance: High

Does anyone have any RECENT information of the accessibility of Moodle and JAWS? Most of the students I work with who have one from of vision loss or blindness say they cannot access content especially file downloads so I tend to download them for them and reformat any PDF's to Word. One student in particular wants to be able to use JAWS independently with Moodle but we keep hitting roadblocks (and to top it off Im deaf so Im not finding an easy way to self teach what I do not know yet) Tip sheets would be fantastic but the only thing I have found was app specific short cuts for Explorer or Firefox etc.

Any and all suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

Maria Bohn
Senior Resource Accommodation Specialist Assistive Technology Office of Specialized Services Bergen Community College _______________________________________________
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