According to the World Health Organisation and the World Bank, there are over a billion people in the world who are struggling with disabilities, and about 93 to 150 million of them are children? Reports further state that these individuals are 10 times less likely to go to school compared to other people.

If you are having a difficult time finding social and emotional books for your classroom, here are some good recommendations.

Due to an alarming growth in mental health problems among children and young adults, social emotional learning is necessary to support our students.

When it comes to social emotional learning in an elementary curriculum, what is the best way to help students understand? By reading a story of course! Books can offer a great way to get the students attention and provide a way for the student to understand. This is made possible through you reading the story (auditory), the words written on the pages ( visual), or through the pictures!

Lets explore three great stories that help our students become more in touch with their own feelings and build empathy toward others!

Respect is a value that encompasses a lot of other values and actions, and is often a value that needs to be taught to young learners before these learners can truly appreciate respect on its own. These three books I've looked at all focus on instilling values like perspective and empathy to ultimately encourage readers to value respecting not just others, but themselves as well.

By viewing this post, you will be unleashing the possibility of expanding your teacher tool box by adding a new, intriguing instrument. This new tool is utilizing social and emotional learning (SEL) friendly books! To elaborate, this new tool could be extremely beneficial for a wide variety of students and can truly give rise to many wonderful outcomes for these children as individuals. Also, in this post you will find three awesome examples alongside a quick analysis of SEL-friendly book choices you can use in your classroom! 

This post is all about a few ideal children's literature selections to enhance social emotional development in children.

Children are funny, kind, mean, and brutally honest. But who are they? This blog goes through three different books to allow your child to discover themselves. 

This Article is to take you into a deeper dive of children's SEL books and what they mean to educators, students and parents around the world. Take a glimpse into the look and life of those who have social emotional learning patterns.

The UDOIT developer community has been putting a lot of work into making UDOIT 3 more capable, easier to install, more stable, and easier to debug.  Check out the highlights!

Navigating Canvas with JAWS

JAWS is a commonly used accessibility screen reader and is one of the screen readers supported for use with Canvas. This post will discuss some basics of using JAWS with Canvas.

Navigating through Canvas you can use JAWS shortcuts to locate, bypass, and select without having to move through all individual elements like any other website.  

Here is a link to a guide for JAWS shortcuts: 

https://dequeuniversity.com/screenreaders/jaws-keyboard-shortcuts

Page Regions

The Canvas website layout has a few landmarks/regions that make up the page layout.

In a course, you will have the following regions:

• Skip to Content: The first element on any Canvas page that a screen reader user will hit is the “Skip to Content” link.  This bypasses all of the navigation items on the page.
• Global Navigation: This is a list of links to access your account settings, courses, calendar, inbox and help menu.  Link to Global Navigation Canvas Guide
• Course Navigation: This is a list of links to access different course areas like Assignments, Discussions, Modules, Grades, Course Settings, etc.  Link to Course Navigation Canvas Guide
• Breadcrumbs List:  Shows where you are in a course
• Main Content: After the Course Navigation you’re at the main content of your course link.  If you’ve just entered a course, the main content section will be your course’s home page.
• Complementary Region (If there is any):  Complimentary content.  

Navigation Between Courses

If you’re trying to get to a specific course and you’re at your main dashboard, you can do as follows to get to a specific course:

• Press “R” twice (this moves through regions of the page with JAWS), this will get you to the global navigation region. 
• Use the down arrow until you hit “Courses” and press Enter.  This puts you in the courses tray (you will reach a close button first which closes the tray, then the tray heading <H2>, and then your list of courses). 
• Use the up/down arrows to navigate your list of courses until you find the correct one and press enter.

Navigation Within Courses

Once you’re in the course, if you press “R”, the first region is the skip to content region (if you press enter, it will skip all of the global/course navigation and take you to the main region of the page).  If you do not use the skip to content link and press "R" again and this is your Global Navigation Region which JAWS will read how many navigation items there are, Press "R" again, you get the Breadcrumbs Navigation Region, this will show you exactly where you are in the course, Press "R" again, you get to the Course Navigation Region (List of links to areas of your course).  Once you get to the region you’re looking for, you can use the up/down arrows to navigate the buttons/links in that region.

Example:  If you want to get directly to your course modules from anywhere in a course, you can do the following:

• Press “R” 4 times (this should get you to the courses navigation region)
• Press “Down Arrow” until it reads Modules and press enter.  This will take you to the modules index page of your course
• If you press “H” (this moves through Headings of the page with JAWS), it will take you to the <H1> on the page (every Canvas page has an <H1> at the top of the main content region).  If you press the “Down Arrow”, it will move you through all the elements of your Course Modules List.  This is where you can add modules, add module items, edit any existing modules, etc.

In the spirit of International Day of Disabled Persons on the 3rd December, read about tangible ways that Canvas can help you create accessible resources through a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) lens.

This is the first official open source release of the "Next Generation" UDOIT! It has been completely rewritten from the ground up to make it easier and faster to use. It's also more extensible, so we can more easily add new accessibility checks and other features.

This is the final UDOIT 2.x release!  It contains a number of feature enhancements and bug fixes.  We're also changing the way we interact with the community.

Coranavirus and trying to get caught up in my classes.

This release is focused on improving the user experience.  Cidi Labs contributed most of the code for this release in response to requests from their customers, and we are extremely grateful for this contribution.  If you are attending CanvasCon next week, please visit them at their virtual booth!

Now, on to the changes.  The first one you will notice is that the Content and Scan for lists have been moved into an accordion widget titled Scanning Options.  The widget is positioned above the Scan This Course button in order to closely follow the layout of previous versions of UDOIT.

The New UDOIT Home Screen

When the scan is complete, the Welcome to UDOIT! and Scanning Options boxes will collapse, conserving vertical space.

Screenshot showing how the interface collapses after a scan

The report view has changed significantly.  Each section of the course where errors or suggestions were found will be listed on the left side.  The section selected when the scan completes is the Summary, which allows the user to show or hide all errors or suggestions or individual errors or suggestions in the report.

Screenshot showing the report filtering interface with some errors hidden

Selecting the Pages item in the left menu shows the portion of the report related to Pages.  The interface should be familiar from this point on.

Screenshot of the Pages section of the report

The Unscannable Files section now detects more types of unscannable files.  These file types are customizable, so you can add to or remove from to the defaults if you so desire.

Screenshot of the new file types added to the Unscannable Files section

Upgrade Instructions

• Download UDOIT version 2.7.0
• Test in a development or QA environment, not on production.
• If you are still using PHP 7.1 or below, you must upgrade to 7.2 or 7.3.
• If you're coming from a version older than 2.6.3:
  • (Self-Hosted) Update your localConfig.php file to make sure it's up to date with localConfig.template.php
  • (Heroku-Hosted) Update your Config Vars to include the new variables
  • back up your database and run "php composer.phar migrate"
• Run "php composer.phar install"
• (Heroku-Hosted) Follow the instructions in HEROKU.md

Features Added

• Added ability to filter the report by error/suggestion type and view a single content section at a time. Thanks Cidi Labs! #498
• Reworked the the way unlisted/private/deleted YouTube/Vimeo videos are handled. Now they show up in their own Suggestion instead of being marked for manual inspection in other Errors or Suggesions. #547
• Added documentation for which folders need to be writeable by your webserver #548
• Updated Quail to support all types of table structures #488
• Unscannable File extensions are now configurable #474

Bugs Fixed

• Fixed a memory usage issue with the Most Common Errors report in the Admin Panel #502
• Cleaned up some old YouTube-related code from lib/UdoitUtils.php #491
• Fixed issue where tables with <p> tags in them prevent U FIX IT from working #488
• Large images no longer break out of the bounds of the preview pane. #451
• Floated images no longer float out of the bounds of the preview pane. #449

Side note:  I tried to add proper headings to this post, but this software does not allow heading tags.  If you have any issues navigating the content of this post, please let me know.

A few institutions have contacted me over the last few weeks regarding an error they receive when launching UDOIT in Chrome.  The full error is "Missing Session information. Please refresh the page. Missing: base_url".  Here's how to solve it.

I'm back with another bugfix release!  If you are able, it would be most helpful if you could update your QA or Testing instance of UDOIT to this version; the last few bugfix releases were made possible by institutions testing out the code in their unique environments.  I greatly appreciate the help!

Upgrade Instructions

• Download UDOIT version 2.6.4
• Test in a development or QA environment, not on production.
• If you are still using PHP 7.1 or below, you must upgrade to 7.2 or 7.3.
• If you're coming from a version older than 2.6.3:
  • (Self-Hosted) Update your localConfig.php file to make sure it's up to date with localConfig.template.php
  • (Heroku-Hosted) Update your Config Vars to include the new variables
  • back up your database and run "php composer.phar migrate"
• Run "php composer.phar install"
• (Heroku-Hosted) Follow the instructions in HEROKU.md

Bugs Fixed

• Changed "expire" key to "lifetime" for creating the session cookie. The old key was invalid, and was causing a PHP warning to be thrown. #530
• Added a line to Quail to remove whitespace from HTML to eliminate false positive for missing table headers. #529
• Updated html-minifier to a fork that fixes a warning in PHP7 #527
• Updated to latest version of Composer #527
• Changed misleading error when a syllabus_body is not returned from Canvas. If UDOIT is using a scoped developer key, an empty syllabus_body will display an error message to the user explaining the limitations of scoped developer keys in some installations of Canvas. If UDOIT is not using a scoped developer key, UDOIT tells the user that no accessibility issues were found in the Syllabus. #490

This release fixes a number of issues, both new and old.  A huge thanks to escull‌ for figuring out so many of these.  If you've been having any trouble with tables, please test out this version and let me know if it your issues are resolved.

Upgrade Instructions

• Download UDOIT version 2.6.3 now!
• Test in a development or QA environment, not on production.
• If you are still using PHP 7.1 or below, you must upgrade to 7.2 or 7.3.
• (Self-Hosted) Update your localConfig.php file to make sure it's up to date with localConfig.template.php
• (Heroku-Hosted) Update your Config Vars to include the new variables
• Run "php composer.phar install"
• If you're coming from a version older than 2.6.2, back up your database and run "php composer.phar migrate"
• (Heroku-Hosted) Follow the instructions in HEROKU.md

Bugs Fixed

• If you've been having trouble with detecting and fixing table headers, we may have fixed the issue:
  • UFIXIT for tables fixed for PHP 7.3. So, that means UDOIT is now compatible with PHP 7.3!
  • UFIXIT for tables now works when selecting "first column" or "both".
  • One institution reported that UFIXIT added an empty row to a table when a space is present in the HTML. This was fixed.
• The status page accurately reports status of the Developer Key.
• Decreased memory usage when generating "Most Common Errors" report in the admin panel.

Enhancements

• A list of all the tests UDOIT looks for was added to the README
• The YouTube Terms of Service and Google Privacy Policy were added to footer in order to comply with the YouTube API usage requirements. This feature is able to be enabled, disabled, and customized.
• A less expensive endpoint used for testing the Google API key in the status page.

Most of the functions in Microsoft Teams have a slightly different Keyboard Navigation method than most functionality within Canvas. Microsoft Teams will primarily use the Tab key to move between a group of objects, and then from that group, use the Arrow Keys to navigate within the controls of that group. However, if the focus indication is placed over a larger set rather than on a single control in a group, you will need to press the Enter/Return key first in order to interact with that group.

Example: Keyboard Navigation for a Message

Pressing the Tab key will create a focus box around the entire message

Pressing the Enter/Return key will place focus around the top half of the message

Pressing the Down arrow will move focus to the Reply section of the message

Pressing the Up arrow will move focus back up to the top half of the message

Message Top Half:

Pressing the Enter/Return key will display the Emoji Reactions, which can be selected with Arrows & Enter/Return key

Pressing the Tab key will move you to the “…” menu, which you can navigate with Arrows & Enter/Return key

Message Bottom Half:

Pressing the Enter/Return key will open the reply text field

Pressing Tab will place focus in  lower settings and attachment menu bar

Pressing Tab again will place focus on the Send icon

Pressing Tab again will place your cursor in the text field

Hopefully this document helps give a good indication of how to navigate smoothly with the controls in Microsoft Teams. Additionally, Microsoft has extensive accessibility support documentation that includes screen reader walkthroughs & keyboard shortcuts.

With things changing and students transitioning to online classes from home, we want to ensure that they have the resources to learn and access content in Canvas.  The following offers alternative technologies users can utilize if they do not have access to the same technologies available through their institution. 

The following are free accessibility tools that users can download which have been thoroughly tested within Canvas by our Accessibility team.

NVDA is a great screen reader for Windows platform and is free to use.  We suggest pairing NVDA with Firefox when navigating Canvas. You can download them through the following links:

NVDA Download

Firefox Download

Below is a user guide that has many of the keyboard commands and features that you can access through NVDA.

https://webaim.org/resources/shortcuts/nvda

If you’re a Mac user at home but use a Windows machine in class, you can use VoiceOver paired with Safari which is already available on your Mac computer, iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.  There is no need to download or setup anything.  

Below is a getting started guide with the basic commands for VoiceOver. 

https://webaim.org/articles/voiceover/

We also have Android and iOS apps available that you can download through their respected app stores.  Both apps have been tested in Canvas with iOS VoiceOver and Android’s TalkBack.

iOS:  https://apps.apple.com/us/app/canvas-student/id480883488

Android:  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.instructure.candroid&hl=en_US

For additional information on Accessibility within Canvas or our apps, please visit our community guides which have a lot of useful information: 

Accessibility within Canvas

Canvas Student App

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to our customer support department and we’re more than happy to further assist you.

This release fixes some bugs that were reported shortly after the release of 2.6.1  Thanks to  @janejump ‌ for discovering these!

Download version 2.6.2 of UDOIT now! Please refer to the release notes for 2.6.0 for installation and configuration instructions.

Bugs Fixed

• The cookie fix for Safari (safari_fix.php) would load even in Chrome
• safari_fix.php would load when trying to access udoit.xml.php, preventing initial setup of UDOIT.

This release fixes some bugs that were reported shortly after the release of 2.6.0.  I would like to thank Tulane University and Cidi Labs for discovering these issues and contributing solutions!

Please refer to the release notes for 2.6.0 for installation and configuration instructions.

Bugs Fixed

• Updated mPDF version to the latest, which adds compatibility with PHP 7.2.
• Repositioned the SameSite cookie settings so that they can be overridden in localConfig.php.
• Added a fix that works around the default Safari cookie policy.  Essentially, it streamlines the process of creating a cookie for a first-time UDOIT user so that Safari allows UDOIT to set cookies from within Canvas in the future.
• Fixed issue where activating the UFIXIT button with your keyboard would cause you to lose focus.  Now, focus changes to the container for the UFIXIT interface after the UFIXIT button is activated.

This is a critical update for any institutions that run UDOIT on a separate domain from their instance of Canvas, such as the LTI server being "lti.myuniversity.edu" and Canvas being "myuniversity.instructure.com".  This update needs to be applied to keep UDOIT working for Chrome users starting in February.  Check the Chromium Blog for more information.

If you aren't able to update UDOIT to the latest version before February, you can manually fix this issue by inserting this session cookie settings code in config/settings.php immediately after the "define('UDOIT_VERSION',..." line.

Important Note:  If you are upgrading from an existing installation, there are some specific instructions you need to follow.  Refer to the full release notes.

PHP 7.3 Incompatibility:  Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we were still unable to figure out the issue with PHP 7.3 on Heroku.  I would appreciate any help the community can provide testing UDOIT on PHP 7.3 and 7.4 on their "testing", "staging" or "QA" servers.  For more information see Issue 422.

Bugs Fixed

• The Admin Panel was making multiple calls to the backend #440
• Hardcoded reports table name #436
• MariaDB did not like the OFFSET syntax that was compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL #435
• Expand/Collapse buttons did not have screen-reader accessible labels #458 (Thanks to UMN and Cidi Labs for reporting this!)
• Cookie policy did not support soon-to-be-released default settings in Chrome #459 (Thanks again to Cidi Labs for contributing code, and to everyone who contacted me about this!)

Features Added

• Compatibility with Scoped Developer Keys #406 #453.  Please see the updated Canvas Oauth2 section of the README for more information.
• Temporarily caching results of YouTube and Vimeo API calls to eliminate redundant calls and reduce API quota usage #360 #455
• Ability to scan only for Errors, Suggestions, or both #424
• Ability to ignore unpublished content during scan #423
• All instances of error_log were converted to use Monolog #412.  This improves error logging, and makes debugging easier.
• YouTube and Vimeo links in "View the source of this issue" open in a new window #377
• Detecting the language of video captions and comparing them to the course language setting #360.
• UFIXIT for "Avoid using styles for document structure" #60
• Instructions for updating existing Heroku installations #471

This release is dedicated to the memory of Dana Danger Grey, a wonderful person and fierce proponent of accessibility.  Read more about Dana's life here.

The main focus for this release is adding the "first draft" of the admin panel.  This interface is accessible from the Account Navigation menu.  Here are its current features:

• View all scans done in all courses at your institution.
• View the most common errors found in courses.
• Administer users.
• View the growth of users over time

Because this feature is still experimental, we have disabled it by default.  However, it's very simple to enable, which is explained in the README.

Important Note:  If you are upgrading from an existing installation, there are some specific instructions you need to follow.  Refer to the full release notes.

PHP 7.3 Incompatibility:  If you are using PHP 7.3 on your servers, give yourself a pat on the back for keeping up with the latest versions!  Unfortunately, due to some issues we've had with PHP 7.3 on Heroku, we do not officially support it at this time.  More testing is needed to determine compatibility.

Bugs Fixed

• Script tags are now stripped from HTML code snippets.  This was causing a number of rendering issues.
• Heroku instances made within the last couple of months had many issues with UFIXIT.  This issue has been fixed, but if you are experiencing those issues, you will need to go through the Heroku instance creation process again.

Features Added

• Admin interface
• Images marked as decorative in the RCE are detected and ignored (no error or suggestion is thrown).
• The date and time for old reports is now displayed in a more human-readable format.
• Database options can now be passed through to the PDO constructor by way of the localConfig file.
• The Job Queue table name is now configurable.

• Removed compatibility with deprecated version of PHP (5.6 and 7.0)

I have always appreciated that Canvas takes accessibility seriously, as evidenced in their Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, community efforts and frequent mentions of accessibility in their release notes it is clear that accessibility of the product is a priority. 

That said, there are also lots of opportunities for additional features impacting students with disabilities to be developed. While you can find many of these ideas in the Ideas Conversations searching for the #accessibility tag,   this document can hopefully be a resource to help organize and track some of those features. This document is open to anyone to edit so feel free to add any features that have been missed or leave a note in the comments. 

If you agree with any of the feature ideas below please take a minute to add your vote. Also, if you have ideas for additional features that have not been added please to add a new feature and add the link below! 

Accessibility Feature Request Resources

1. How does the feature idea process work in the Canvas Community?
2. Accessibility Group 
3. Feature ideas tagged with accessibility, disability, or accommodation. 

Features Sorted by Component/Issue

General Accessibility

1. Tool to check Accessibility at the course level
2. Accessibility Enhancements for Permissions Icons
3. Dyslexie font for dyslexic folks - A setting option to change the font display?
4. Tag IEP and 504 students in SpeedGrader
5. Default Font Adjustment for WYSIWYG Text Entry
6. Provide official support for Kurzweil screen readers
7. Immersive Reader for Mobile Devices
8. Improve Student DocViewer Comment View/Accessibility

Color Contrast

1. Hyperlink Color Contrast
2. High contrast colors for analytics
3. Insufficient Contrast Ratio - dates for recent accouncements in course homepage
4. Contrast Ratio - published buttons, discussion subscription buttons, and "Course is Published" text

Quizzes/Quizzes.Next

1. Provide a method to determine which courses are using New Quizzes
2. Speech to Text in New Quizzes
3. New Quizzes: Quiz Availability & Extended Time
4. New Quizzes: pause button for students with extra time
5. New Quizzes: Improve time limit function
6. New Quizzes: Quiz Accommodation to Reduce Answer Choices

Images

1. Add alt text at the file level
2. Default Alt-Text on Uploaded Images

Video

1. Captioning in Studio at the Bottom of the Video
2. Closed Caption editing in ARC
3. Improve Captioning Editing in Studio
4. Student Video Submission Transcript Feature
5. New API to fetch captions from Canvas Studio
6. Adapt closed captions font size in Studio
7. Search and replace in captions editor

Catalog

1. Make Canvas Catalog Accessible

Completed Accessibility Features

1. Always allow extra time for specific students (IEP, LEP, etc.)
2. Images – Easier Way to add ALT Text
3. Alt Text "Decorative Image" Option in Rich Content Editor
4. High Contrast Toggle
5. Change Color of Help Menu Font
6. Scroll bar tone
7. Ability to Moderate a Quizzes.Next Quiz Before a Student Accesses a Quiz
8. Make Math Equation Editor Accessible
9. New RCE alt-text option before image is inserted
10. Expanding Support for Accessible HTML 5 Section Elements
11. Change Color of Help Menu Font
12. Disability students extra time on quizzes

Archived Accessibility Ideas

1. Adding Accessibility in Canvas Quizzes
2. Account Notification Settings - hidden descriptive text needs a visual indicator or icon
3. Separate Audio & Video upload options in the "Upload Media" tool (accessibility concerns)
4. Bulk Quiz moderation: Setting extra time for a student for all the quizzes

I've written some accessibility tools for Canvas using JS, they're plug and play so you shouldn't need any programming knowledge to incorporate them into your own instance.

See my original post in Canvas Admins:‌ Using JS to Add Accessibility Features to Canvas‌.

Please leave any comments/feedback here for me to see  Otherwise I can't fix or add anything to it!

Fixes the following bugs:

• There was a typo in the migrations script (thanks  @tanners !) that would prevent reports from very old versions of UDOIT from transferring to the database.
• Special characters in page titles would break the "view source of this issue" button (thanks Justin Lopez from FIU!).

View the release notes to download this release.

In my haste to release 2.4.0 before the holiday break, I forgot to include the changes I made to the "No closed captions found on media comment" error.  You can view the 2.4.1 release notes to download this version of UDOIT.

Happy new year!

We are working on some larger features for the 2.5.0 release, but we wanted to get these out to you before the start of the new year.  Many of these features and bug fixes are a direct result of the conversations we've been having with people on the Canvas Community and the UCF Open Source Slack.

(Yes, Christmas is a real town in Central Florida.)

Important Note:  If you are upgrading from an existing installation, there are some specific instructions you need to follow.  Refer to the full release notes.

Bugs Fixed

• Bold text with color emphasis is no longer flagged as an error.

• UFIXIT for links now lets you include a portion of the URL as your link text (e.g.: "Wikipedia" is perfectly good link text for "https://wikipedia.org").

• Videos playing within "View the source of this issue" now stop playing when you click "Close issue source".

• Improved detection of YouTube and Vimeo videos to avoid erroneous results.

• Docker files no longer mount as directories.

Features added

• Updated the description for missing captions on Media Comments to make it more helpful.
• Added Endpoint that returns the health status of the application in JSON for use in status dashboards.
• Added UI for marking videos that are unlisted, private, or deleted as requiring manual verification for captions.
• Added check for valid YouTube and Vimeo API keys, marking all videos for manual verification if a valid API key is not found for that service. A log entry is also made whenever an invalid key is found.

Read the full release notes for more information and installation/upgrade instructions.

The UDOIT team wishes everyone a safe and happy holiday!