[LON-CAPA-admin] Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA Compliance

[Raeburn, Stuart]

Paul,

I am following up on your post from October 2024 asking about WCAG compliance for LON-CAPA problems.

If you track LON-CAPA development activity by way of the commit logs archived at:
mail.lon-capa.org/pipermail/lon-capa-cvs/ or as documented at source.loncapa.org/cvs/
you will have seen that most LON-CAPA development effort in recent months has concerned:

(i) changes to the LON-CAPA UI for students and course personnel to bring it into compliance with WCAG 2.2 AA

(ii) implementation of a utility for Course Coordinators for automated accessibility checking for selected content in a course (for a specified WCAG standard/level).

Although the DOJ rule specifies 2.1 AA as the compliance level needed, policy at Michigan State University specifies 2.2 AA.  Accordingly, changes in the LON-CAPA codebase also address additional success criteria in 2.2 AA, such as larger touch targets.

Stuart Raeburn
LON-CAPA Academic Consortium
________________________________________
From: LON-CAPA-admin <lon-capa-admin-bounces at mail.lon-capa.org> on behalf of Omernik, Paul via LON-CAPA-admin <lon-capa-admin at mail.lon-capa.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 9, 2024 2:46 PM
To: LON-CAPA-admin at mail.lon-capa.org
Subject: [LON-CAPA-admin] Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1,      Level AA Compliance

Good afternoon,

>From this website: https://verbit.ai/education-elearning/ada-title-ii-update-mandates-digital-accessibility-for-colleges-and-universities-by-2026/<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://verbit.ai/education-elearning/ada-title-ii-update-mandates-digital-accessibility-for-colleges-and-universities-by-2026/__;!!HXCxUKc!1TqIyyJr6NDxZ6zfle0O5b8Le0EgzhvZZlASmT1X2Gkfi6r4EJvbTeS8Qbx3qdkwOPfUB4_cYWpQx-aMmjXsmrQj3Fyp9g$>

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) earlier this summer announced its final rule revising Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), requiring web and mobile application content to be accessible to people with disabilities.

Title II of the ADA applies to all state and local governments, which includes, among other entities, public schools, community colleges and public universities.

The rule, designed to ensure all digital services are ADA-compliant, clarifies the obligations of public education institutions to make their websites and mobile apps "readily accessible to and usable by individuals with disabilities[...]"

I guess I'm not entirely sure how or what to ask, so I will start with: Will the XML that produces our problems on LON-CAPA be able to be made Title II compliant?

Is it possible to 'caption' a problem so a complex equation can be read by a screen reader? (Alt text?) The same for images of free-body diagrams or circuits, what have you?

Thank you,

Paul