Accessibility for students who are blind
I use Khan Academy regularly in my classroom and cannot even imagine going back to a time before I had access to these valuable resources. Unfortunately, I have found it to be frustrating for a student who is blind. The student uses a screen reader (JAWS I believe) and can navigate most content successfully. The two biggest issues are that graphs and other visual representations are not described and some answers are inaccessible. The easier of those two fixes would be the inaccessible answers. Some problems require drop down menus, plotting points, or dragging and dropping items. These problems are not accessible and stop my student from being able to move forward with an assignment. When the assignment has a mixture of open response and multiple choice problems, which are accessible, with a few that are not accessible the student is not able to move past these to continue on. It seems as though the "Hide visually-dependent content" checkbox should avoid these problems. However, I've tried checking the box myself and it does nothing to change what content I am assigned. One fix would be to make checking this box stop inaccessible problems from ever being assigned. Another would be to make checking the box provide a student access to skipping problems that are found to be inaccessible. I generally appreciate that students cannot skip problems, but in this case I have a student who is not getting the same learning opportunities as the rest of the class, sometimes because of a single problem that stops her from being able to complete an assignment. I understand that hiding this content would reduce the number of problems available for practice, but I feel it is better than not being able to complete an assignment at all. As Khan Academy has evolved, I have found the problem types to be rich and the different styles of questioning/answering have led to deeper thinking problems. Dragging and dropping answers sometimes makes for a higher level method of answering, but if it's not accessible then I'd rather it be eliminated for students who can otherwise access the majority of the content. I know that the mission of Khan Academy aims to provide free educational resources to ALL students. I'm frustrated for my student when I see that posts from two years ago are facing the same issues we are facing today and I am hopeful that there is a solution on the horizon or one already available that I am just missing. I greatly appreciate any feedback!
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