The Bluffer’s Guide to Blackboard Theme Accessibility

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Synopsis

With the rapid move to online teaching, ensuring equitable access to our learning environment has never been more important. Recent legislation has brought an accessibility requirement for public sector organisations such as Universities. How can we ensure that our Blackboard environment reflects our institutional brand whilst following accessibility guidelines?

Customising the Blackboard Responsive theme for the Learn Original Experience continues to be a hot topic on the Blackboard Community site. We customise the theme both to improve the user experience, and to brand our environment with our institutional colours.

In this session I will put recent legislative and regulatory changes that relate to accessibility into a global context and explain how they impact University platforms such as Blackboard.

Using examples and developments from my own experience at the University of Southampton, I will provide practical advice and tips on what we should be doing when we customise our Blackboard theme. We all want our Blackboard environments to look great and appear congruent when viewed alongside our other institutional platforms. We also want to ensure changes we make are inclusive to our whole user community.

I will demonstrate how you may check the accessibility of your own custom Blackboard theme and illustrate the application of a number of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to Blackboard theme customisation. I will also discuss how the work we do in this area can inform the accessibility statements we are required to create for our Virtual Learning Environment.

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Presentation Files

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• Download the short "live" presentation PDF file (3.26 MB)

Links from the presentation

News items

• 'I hate COVID-19': Kids with disabilities struggle to adjust as schools close
• In The Middle of A Pandemic, COVID-19 Information Remains Inaccessible to Visually Impaired People
• People with disabilities will remember your words and actions when COVID-19 is over
• The 3 Biggest Remote Teaching Concerns We Need to Solve Now
• COVID-19 Highlights the Importance of Digital Accessibility and Inclusion
• Accessibility must be part of your COVID-19 response
• Report: COVID-19 Crisis is Driving Digital Accessibility Awareness
• How is COVID-19 Impacting Digital Accessibility?
• How is COVID-19 Impacting Digital Accessibility? [Report in PDF format (637 kb)

Legislation

• The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.
• Directive (EU) 2016/2102 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 October 2016 on the accessibility of the websites and mobile applications of public sector bodies (Text with EEA relevance).
• List of national transpositions of the above directive throughout European Union members.

Precedents

• Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).
• Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions A Digital Agenda for Europe.
• European Disability Strategy 2010-2020: A Renewed Commitment to a Barrier-Free Europe.

Standards and regulations

• Regulation (EU) No 1025/2012 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 October 2012 on European standardisation.
• Standard - EN 301 549. This is the standard we should be following.
• See the updates for the above Standard - EN 301 549.
• Directive (EU) 2019/882 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on the accessibility requirements for products and services (Text with EEA relevance).
• Governement Digital Service "Starter Pack".

WCAG

• WCAG 2.1.
• WCAG 2.2 (first draft available).
• Information about the next generation of WCAG known as "Silver".

Blackboard Community

• Show us your accessibility statement.
• Let me show you my Blackboard. - Blog post where I demonstrate some enhancements I have made in the past year to our Blackboard interface.

Tools

• Microsofts Accessibility Insights browser add on.

About Colour Blindness

• Visual impairment and computing - common questions.
• Colour blind awareness.
• Colour blindness on Wikipedia.

Colour Contrast

• Relative Luminance.
• Comparing Luminance.
• Relative luminance and contrast ratio.
• Color Theory and Contrast Ratios.
• WebAIM Colour Contrast Checker.
• Accessible Colour Suggester.
• Who can use? (My recommended colour contrast checker).
• Using Inspect Element to check colour contrasts.
• Enthusiastic discussion about how colour contrast should be calculated in the future.

Example of enforcing a colour scheme based on Blackboard Course IDs using JSHack

• Download JSHack 1.0.13.
• JS Hacks wiki.
• Example JS Hack that loads CSS on ARCH courses that forces course menus to a certain colour scheme based on the course id.

University of Southampton resources

• UoS Brand Colour Palette.
• Using Colours Accessibly - this is where you can find my colour accessibility matrix and other examples.

Recommended Links for personal development

• Learn HTML, CSS, and Javascript
• CSS Tricks
• Accessibility with Lindsey
• Laura L. Carlson's weekly newsletter with selected links to new Accessibility and CSS content from around the web.
• Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit
• Web Accessibility checklist

CSS

• About hover
• More about hover
• About focus
• More about focus
• Reducing motion