This post contains accessibility testing that was carried out as a team by Ian Elliott, Graham North and myself.
H5P is a great way to create interactive e-learning materials. We are using Moodle as our institutional VLE and it is easy to create H5P content within Moodle. H5P also contains documentation about various H5P content type accessibility. This meant that we could select accessible content types when creating our e-learning.
We are creating new templates and we wanted to make sure they were accessible. Therefore, we started testing accessibility of H5P Course Presentation content type before we allowed these to be widely used.
Despite the OK against accessibility status in the H5P content type accessibility, I was not able to use/access the presentation content using keyboard and NVDA screen-reader software. There are various screen-reader software, but we decided to use NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access) to test because it is a free software, which anyone can use.
- NVDA version 2019.2.1
- Google Chrome version 79.0.3945.117
- Internet Explorer version 11.535.18362.0
- Firefox version 72.0.1
I was not able to get to any of the content on the presentation I was testing to work with Chrome. Riffling through user comments on the H5P content type accessibility page I found that there were others who seem to have had similar issues. However, from developer replies it seemed that these content types were tested in terms of accessibility and were working fine.
So I downloaded the example Course Presentation and uploaded this to our Moodle Sandbox site for testing. Below I have described my testing and the versions of software tested is also given. When there are active elements on slides you can tab into the slide and then the screen reader is able to read the content.
Chrome and NVDA
This video shows how I navigated the Course Presentation only using the keyboard and NVDA screen reader.
Firefox and NVDA
This video shows navigating the same Course Presentation with Firefox and NVDA screen reader.
Internet Explorer and NVDA
With Internet Explorer as soon as I tabbed into the slide (the active link in the slide) it started reading the content. So from this testing experience IE worked best.
However, I noticed that when we had not used titles for slides and slide menu was not activated NVDA started reading the whole content of the presentation (slide 1, slide 2,… slide n) when tabbed into the presentation for the first time. But if you have the menu or slide titles activated this did not happen.
We are hoping to add a line to the accessibility statement to inform our students about the H5P presentation accessibility with screen reader. What are your experiences of testing accessibility with H5P?
Note: We are not NVDA users and only using NVDA as a testing tool with minimum amount of screen reader use/experience.
I am a Learning Technology Researcher and the Chair of the Online Learning Research Centre at the University College of Estate Management. My principle research interests lie in the area of social implications of information and communication technologies, especially eLearning.