Mobile App Accessibility

[suzanne_r_david]

Hi all,

I hope that I am posting this in the correct place. I happen to have five students in my class this term that are blind or low vision, using either screen readers or high levels of screen magnification.

One of my students sent me the following:

I have noticed that when using the Canvas App, the announcements tend to overlap each other when using an iPhone and large text is on. I also noticed this happening in part of the messaging feature as well.

I haven't seen any discussion of accessibility related to the mobile app. Is that because I'm just missing the discussion/looking in the wrong place, because nobody else is hearing about problems, or ...?

Thanks!

Suzanne

[christopher_phi]

This is a great place for that discussion, but I would agree with you that there doesn't seem to be very much accessibility discussion around the mobile app experience in the community. I'm not sure, but I don't think the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template | Canvas Learning Management System  addresses the mobile apps either.

I would recommend submitting any bugs you find to support. Another area you may want to post is the Canvas/Athen Community, information on joining that community available at Multiple Canvas Accessibility Spaces. There is actually a phone call with that group this afternoon! 

[peytoncraighill]

Hi  @suzanne_r_david ! Thanks for reporting this. We're in the process of porting the announcements and discussions components from teacher app into student app, and that will fix this issue for your students. This work should be completed in the next few weeks; keep your eyes peeled for the release of student app version 6.1 for iOS and Android.

[christopher_phi]

Thanks  @peytoncraighill ‌, this is great to hear. Besides the issues  @suzanne_r_david  mentions do you have other information about the general accessibility of the mobile app - iOS/Android? Perhaps something like the VPAT that is available for the web experience? 

[peytoncraighill]

Hi  @christopher_phi ! We haven't created a mobile-specific VPAT to date because accessibility guidelines for native mobile applications haven't coalesced around a standard like WCAG 2.0 for web development yet. However, we do design, develop and test our native apps to be as consistently accessible as any other piece of Canvas -- supporting high contrasts, large text, and screen readers on device for both iOS and Android platforms. If you notice any accessibility issues with any of our apps, the fastest way to get them into our queue and resolved is by contacting our support team, or otherwise emailing me.

[ncrisosto]

Thank you for the work to ensure accessibility of Canvas in mobile environments.  However, my understanding is that a mobile application needs to conform to the revised Section 508 standards.  "All public facing electronic content, including applications and interactive content, must meet the Revised 508 Standards." from Accessibility Resources for Developers and Authors.

[peytoncraighill]

Yes! Thanks for raising this  @ncrisosto ; it's a good point to clarify. For all intents and purposes, we map our mobile development and testing onto the same accessibility standards as the rest of Canvas (WCAG and Section 508). So for example, just this week the iOS team changed the math for color contrast in the title bars within courses in student and teacher apps to maintain a ratio of at least 4.5:1, which we get from level AA of WCAG 2.0. My response above was only referring to why we don't offer a mobile-specific VPAT today: because accessibility standards specific to mobile apps are just all over the place, including within Section 508 -- which now references WCAG -- and within WCAG. Apple's got their own guidelines, Google's got their own guidelines, and neither of them mentions the other or WCAG or Section 508. We'll surely maintain Section 508 compliance, but more importantly if there are blocking accessibility issues for kids using the Canvas apps, we want to fix them as soon as possible -- regardless of the standard that applies or doesn't apply to mobile.

[laura_r_hamrick]

Suzanne, I'm glad you brought this up! Mobile app accessibility is something I've been in conversations with folks about recently, and it seems like there's not a lot of information available right now about known issues.

 @tft ‌, maybe we could add this topic to a future Canvas/ATHEN call agenda once the Student app versions are under less active development and are in a more stable place? (Or maybe now is a good time to have the conversation, while development is still active?)

[peytoncraighill]

Update!

Mobile and accessibility team leads met last Friday to discuss documenting a mobile accessibility standard that we could publish. It'll define the contrasts, font sizes and screen-readers that we support and use in testing. Here's what it looked like, because smart people working on hard problems is always exciting to me:

There's going to be some squishiness in whatever we publish, but the goal is to focus expectations for mobile accessibility on something we/you can point to.

For a quick summary of the challenge: You can imagine distinct phone/tablet manufacturers being the equivalent of distinct web browsers insomuch as their systems handle accessibility modes differently. But in our case, there are many more phone manufacturers and operating system versions to consider than there are popular web browsers, and for users, changing devices isn't as straightforward as changing browsers on a computer.

Here's how three different manufacturers handle high contrast mode on the login page of the teacher app:

Samsung: pretty good! iOS: barely noticeable. Stock Android: almost unreadable.

Then add a half-dozen more manufacturers, combine that with underdeveloped automated testing frameworks available for iOS and Android, and combine that with underdeveloped mobile accessibility standards, and the challenge is pretty clear.

But we're going to take a stab at providing some clarification that we'll likely need to iterate on. To the extent that we can, we'll continue to ensure accessibility is baked into designs that work across platforms. As usual, if you're running into blocking issues with accessibility on either platform, call our support team (most preferable), post in the community or email me so we can address them ASAP or otherwise communicate a plan to address them.