Accessibility Statement

At OpenLearning, accessibility is one of our design pillars as it is essential for our mission of scalable, equitable, and meaningful education. We strive to provide a platform for all course providers and learners. 

We know that some parts of our platform aren't fully accessible just yet but we continue to expand the scope of accessible areas of the platform with every new feature and enhancement.

Our compliance status

The OpenLearning web platform is Web Content Accessibility Guideline(WCAG) AA compliant in all areas of the platform that are essential for learners to complete their course work. This also includes being compatible with a range of assistive technologies.

We’ve also completed an accessibility audit with AccessibilityOz in 2018. Since then we have maintained a Google Lighthouse metrics score above 90 (recommended) for all types of pages inside courses that lear:)ners may engage with.

We are committed to making continuous improvements to align with the WCAG 2.1 AA standards.

Learn more about our compliance status here.

What are some examples of accessibility improvements have we released? 

Skip Links

On any page in our platform, users can now select the tab button and a hidden dropdown menu will display in the upper left corner.* Users can use space (Mac) or enter (PC) and the up and down arrows to access the menu options. To select an option, users can select tab twice on Chrome, and once on other browsers.

All pages

On all pages, except for pages inside a course, the user will be able to skip to the Main content of the page and to the Sitemap by select tab twice on Chrome, and once on other browsers.

• Main content will bring the user to the first focusable item on the page. 
• Sitemap will bring the user to the first focusable item in the footer.

Course pages

Once logged in to a course, the user will have two additional options in the skip links menu: Navigation menu and My Progress.

• Navigation menu brings the user to the first item in the side navigation bar. Often, but not always, this is the Homepage.
• My Progress brings the user to their progress bar.  

This improvement in navigation will help users, and especially learners, efficiently access the information they need to get to the most important work of the course: learning.

Alternative text

Users will be able to input accessible image descriptions, known as alternative text, in the following areas of the platform:

• Insert/edit image in Text Widget
• Attach a file in Comments
• Insert/edit image in Post Text Widget
• Add image in Post Image Widget

We are still improving our features but there are still a few areas that users cannot write alt-text for their images, and OpenLearning does not automatically generate alt-text.

Visual Contrast

Within courses, in Galleries, Posts, Chat and Feeds, the platform generated text, icons and components (like dropdown windows) will have a 4.5:1 contrast ratio by default. We updated our colour scheme in 2018 to achieve this.

Headings and links (when unselected) will now appear darker, often black-90  or black-80. Components, like the dropdown window in galleries, will contain darker text and the dropdown outline is darker. On hover we’ve elected to use Kelp.

New Insert/edit image modal

Users will not be responsible for image responsiveness, instead, images will be responsive upon upload. The height field will be greyed out and the auto-size box in the Styles tab will be ticked by default. This is a big value-add to our users, who previously were either unaware that re-sizing wasn't happening automatically, resulting in a poor experience for students using mobile or were performing a variety of hacks every time they uploaded an image. This change will apply to all new images. 

Accessible video player (WIP)

We have since switched to using AblePlayer, a fully accessible, cross-browser, HTML5 media player. 
It helps by supporting the following: 

• The ability to upload video captions and subtitles.
• The ability to upload audio captions (a.k.a. audio descriptions).
• The ability to add chapters for easy navigation through the video.
• Video player can be controlled via keyboard alone.
• Video player can be controlled via mouse alone.
• High contrast, scalable controls.

AblePlayer's own documentation gives many examples of different combinations of accessible content and what that looks like in AblePlayer: See AblePlayer examples

Learn more about how to use the Accessible Video Player widget on OpenLearning

Report any accessibility issues

We want to improve accessibility beyond compliance, to make a real difference in the lives of our users. While we have done our best to keep up with current standards, this does not always mean we have reached our goal of a great experience for all our users.

If you find that we’re not meeting your accessibility needs, please contact us:
Email: contact@openlearning.com