According to my testing, the Categorization question type in New Quizzes is not very accessible to either of the following groups of students:
- A sighted student using keyboard only - There are no visible instructions to indicate how one should select items with a keyboard. Until I turned on a screen reader and heard that you could select one of the categories to choose items to place in it, I was attempting to tab to the drag handles for items and then press various keyboard keys to drag them (I tried up/down/left/right arrows and the U and D keys.) It was not obvious to me as a user that I could press Enter on the drag handles to pull up a list of categories.
- A student using the NVDA screen reader in Chrome.
The following discussion indicates that this question type has been verified with supported browsers/screen reader combinations:
Per Canvas' Accessibility statement, NVDA and Chrome is a supported screen reader/browser combination. With NVDA enabled in Chrome, I am not able to select an answer from the list of possible answers. When I press the down arrow with the list open, NVDA repeats "The preceding content is partner provided" and I can't select any items to answer. Here's a video of attempting to answer Categorization question with NVDA (mp4).
I recommend the following to make this question accessible:
- The message indicating to students when they tab into one of the categories that they should "Press Enter to select an answer," should be visible. This could be done by placing the text under the category box when you tab into it, similar to how dates in the correct format appear under certain date fields when you start typing in them (Mock-up below). Alternatively, a keyboard icon similar to the one shown above Rich-Text Editors could be placed on the page near the categories so a keyboard user could open it to read the instructions.
- The screen reader issue should be addressed, or if that's not possible in the short term, a warning message to instructors similar to the one presented for Hot Spot questions should be placed on the authoring/editing pages to indicate that the question type is not accessible to students using certain screen readers.
