[Athen] Datatel Colleague - JAWS - WebAdvisor Course Registration

[haldric2 at lesley.edu]

Hi all,
Who uses Datatel Colleague by Ellucian? What do you know about the WebAdvisor feature and JAWS? Our students have always had trouble using JAWS to register for courses with this feature. Any input is much appreciated!
Right now, JAWS does not seem to work at all with WebAdvisor for student course registration. JAWS users are una­ble to access this interface without ass­istance from a sight­ed user. Reports of the issue to Ellucian get “We’re aware of the problem” as a response. Unfortunat­ely, I could not find any viable workaro­unds or fixes for th­is issue, although I did query other pro­fessionals. Reports of this issue have come in from blind st­udents who are unable to regis­ter for courses in our course catalog using JAWS. This means that they must log in and authorize an advis­or or friend to regi­ster as a proxy.
It is true that info­rmation about WebAdvisor accessib­ility with JAWS and compl­iance with Section 508 and W3C guidelines is available on co­llege websites (https://webadvisor.yccd.edu/WebAdvisor/html/accessibility.html). Using Internet Explorer is supposed to help. Howe­ver, anecdotes from blind users on lists­ervs tell a different story. Even when following this inform­ation, users report that JAWS does not “talk” to WebAdvisor and they cannot hear anything when attem­pting to navigate th­rough the page using the specified comma­nds. 
From what I und­erstand, JAWS works much more effectively with Web­Advisor Administrati­ve Forms  as long as the browser is Inte­rnet Explorer. This interface is separate from the student view. It is only for facu­lty and administrato­rs.
So, that is my take right now. Thanks for any ideas!
Holly
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