[Athen] Canvas, screen readers and browsers

[Deborah Armstrong]

I noticed several places on our college's site as well in Canvas community forums that system requirements for screen readers still show Internet Explorer and Firefox as preferred. There are also notations that Chrome doesn't work.

I'm a screen reader user so maybe something is happening onscreen that's funky of which I am unaware, but I love Chrome and I find using Chrome in Canvas is the most accessible experience I have ever had with modern web-based applications.

I just finished a course in Chicano history, and previously took three Spanish courses using Canvas, with way too many online quizzes. I am also currently creating a course.

I am using the latest versions of JAWS, NVDA and Narrator. I'm using the latest non-beta production version of Chrome.

And it's a completely wonderful experience! Yes, you have to hit alt-down arrow to get drop-down lists to drop, but that's documented  and as long as you remember to do that, everything reads correctly and displays correctly in Braille. It's easy to enter and mark up text, easy to do assignments, easy to answer quiz questions. I have no problem adding media or external content, creating links and doing anything else in a course I need to do.

Firefox on the other hand keeps getting tweaked, and some tweaks improve accessibility and some, unfortunately break it. We have several in-house web-based apps that require Firefox and it's always an adventure to find out if the current tweak improved or broke things. One tweak stopped list boxes from working; another tweak just slowed screen reader responsiveness. A third tweak made clickable elements not exposed to screen readers. Super annoying!

We do have several computers on campus still using Windows 7 - and I do have friends on XP - which is a huge security risk. People need to realize that if the computer is deprecated the accessibility is as well.

Mac users haven't said that Safari has any problems with Canvas, though occasionally some get documented, but they are visual annoyances mostly. There was some issue with playing videos on Safari but it seemed to be temporary.

The new chromium based Edge is getting better but it's still not as nice of an experience as using Chrome in Canvas.

And Windows explorer is just plain unsafe these days - it shouldn't be recommended anymore at all!

I am no accessibility expert, just a dedicated user who tries hard to know my access technology. So take this as an opinion - I have no credentials!

But, I do really think Chrome needs to be seen as an accessible experience for online learning these days.

--Debee
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