Introduction

Welcome to the NROC Math Player - Accessibility Guide. This guide explains how to navigate the player using screen readers. You should read this guide before launching the player in order to understand the structure of the course and the screen reader technology to use. We recommend using the Chrome browser from Google and installing the ChromeVox extension. This setup works best with our player. We do test other screen readers, such as NVDA and Jaws but have found that ChromeVox works the best. If you do use other screen readers, there may be some questions that are difficult to work through such as matching questions and the various graphing questions.

Tabbing and the Math Explorer

For our math product, tabbing may seem strange until you understand the interactive explorer. Often, you will run across a paragraph with some math in it. The paragraph is spoken naturally with the math in the middle of the sentence. Then when you press tab, it will jump to each math element so that you may explore it further. Pressing shift+space will activate the explorer and you may break down the expression with the arrow keys. Use up/down arrows to "zoom in and out". Use right/left arrows to "walk across" the expression.

Description of Course and Landmarks

Before you launch the player, it is helpful to understand the structure of the course. Each player represents 1 topic of the course. Each topic begins on the Topic Home screen. The Topic Home screen has some content summarizing what this topic is about, a main menu, a global menu that is accessible from every screen, and some complementary information to the side. Wherever possible, we have set up landmarks to make groupings of navigable elements easier to get to. Following is a description of each screen in the player, starting with the Topic Home screen. You can use landmarks to jump ahead to other areas of the screen or you can just use tab. The entire player can be navigated with tab, arrow keys, and either space or enter as an action key.

Topic Home

• Main Landmark - includes an overview of this topic
• Navigation Landmark (Main Menu) - a main menu with 6 items (Typically you would complete these items in order from 1-6, although you are not required to do so)
• Complementary Landmark (Topic Text / Glossary) - describes our "textbook" resources
• Navigation Landmark (Help and Glossary) - includes 2 buttons that are globally available in the player
• Note Landmark (Copyright Information) - Information about our copyright and version of the player

Main Menu

The main menu includes 6 items. Several of those items are video presentations or assessments and share the same user interface navigation. Here is a description of the various items you can jump to from the main menu.

• 1 Warm Up - assessment
• 2 Presentation - video presentation
• 3 Worked Examples - multiple video presentations
• 4 Topic Text - text materials
• 5 Practice - assessment
• 6 Review - assessment

In addition to the 6 menu items, there are a few global items accessible throughout the player. Instead of describing these on every screen, here's a succinct list of globally available items.

Globally Available Navigation Items

• Navigation Landmark (Navigation Menu) - includes a description of where you are and a button to return home. This menu exists on every screen.
• Navigation Landmark (Help and Glossary) - includes 2 buttons that are globally available in the player. The "Help" button describes how to use the player. The "Glossary" button provides supplementary text materials to study the topic.

Video Presentations

All presentations include the global navigation elements plus one new Main Landmark (NROC Video Player) which includes these items for controlling video.

• Video - this is an HTML5 video element. ChromeVox provides intuitive controls for these elements. If you are not using ChromeVox, you will need to tab to the other controls within the player (described below).
  • Spacebar - play/pause the video
  • Right/left arrows seek within the video
  • Once you tab beyond the video element, you can access the built in controller
• Play / Pause - Toggles the play-state of the video
• Closed Captioning - Toggles the visibility of closed captioning
• Volume - Toggle the volume state between full and mute
• Page Navigation - The Worked Examples include multiple presentations and include an extra navigation button describing the current page and buttons to change the current page. The Presentation does not include this element because it is always a single video presentation.

Assessment Items

The Warm Up, Practice, and Review all share a common interface of various question-types. Each assessment starts with instructions, followed by a sequence of questions, followed by a summary screen. In all assessments, except for the Review, the questions provide feedback after answering. If you get a question wrong, you get 1 opportunity to answer the question again. The summary screen provides statistics about your results and may provide additional materials you should study. Possible question types are:

• Multiple Choice Question (single select) - tab to the radio button and use arrow keys to select alternate radio buttons
• Multiple Choice Question (multi select) - tab to the check boxes and "click" to select/deselect
• Fill in the Blank Question - tab to the text-box and enter a response
• Fill in the Table Question - tab through a table with text or text-boxes. Enter your responses in the text-boxes to complete the table.
• Matching Question (may not work with some screen readers) - There are left-side and right-side items that need to be connected to make a match. Tab through the items, "click" to start a connection, then tab through the "other side" items, then "click" to complete connection. The screen reader will read a lot of information about the current item and what it's connected to as you progress. Tab to the "clear" button to reset all connections.
• Plot 1D Question (may not work with some screen readers) - There are 2 variants of this, plot points and plot lines. Plotting lines requires plotting points first and adding the lines in-between the points. In both cases, the player presents a collection of tool buttons. Select a tool (point or line), then tab to the graph, then use arrow keys to select a position, and "click" to set the tool in that place.
• Plot 2D Question (may not work with some screen readers) - There are 2 variants of this, plot points and plot lines. When plotting lines, a line is drawn between every 2 points. In both cases, the player presents a collection of tool buttons. Select a tool, then tab to the graph, then use the arrow keys to select a position. Click to place a point. If you are plotting a line, the second click will connect the 2 points. Also, some questions require selecting an area above/below/right/left of the line. Select the "region" tool, navigate to the graph, then use the arrow keys to select a direction.

Text Materials

The Topic Text, Glossary, and Help include text materials in the main player's frame. Tab into the frame to start reading. You may want to adjust your screen-reader's focus level to just paragraphs or sentences, as the text can be quite long to hear all at once. Some resources, like the text, include glossary items that can be revealed by tabbing to a glossary link and clicking the item.

Video Example

If you would like to watch a video walkthrough of the player's accessibility support click the link. Video Demonstration

Note: since this video was recorded, there have been some improvements including:

• Math expressions are no longer repeated on multiple choice questions
• Several speech rules have been added so that math is read like expected (for example "times" instead of "dot operator")
• Definitions in the text are read by the screen reader when you select them