The accessibility of Moodle is considered at two levels.
System level issues
The Moodle platform is a complex system, with some customised elements. The code is always evolving and we regularly upgrade our site to reflect these changes.
The Moodle development community, supported by the Moodle Accessibility Collaboration Group maintains a list of known accessibility issues, which is regularly updated, and this accessibility statement will be updated to reflect up-to-date information.
Content Level issues
Our academic teams create and upload learning, teaching and assessment content to programme, module and personal tutor sites. Content could include lecture and presentation slides, module handbooks, assignment briefs, and video recordings. Our aim is for all content built in and/or uploaded to Moodle to be fully accessible to all users. However, it is not possible to guarantee this, and it is not therefore possible to say which parts of WU Moodle are accessible or not.
We do know that some parts of Moodle are not fully accessible and we are working hard to improve things. At the time of writing, we consider that the following accessibility issues are of greatest impact:
- If the left-hand 'burger' menu is displayed, the screen reader may read it first. (users of screen readers may wish to hide the menu at first use).
- Some Moodle areas have been set up using a grid layout that makes use of images, but does not allow for 'alt' text for those images to be input. This is true of many of the courses created before the 20/21 academic year.
- Some images and audio video materials have not been provided with meaningful 'alt' text and are not perceivable to assistive technologies.
- Some links in content created in Moodle have not been given an meaningful name (e.g. 'click here').
- Some content created outside of Moodle (e.g. in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or PDF docs) and then uploaded to Moodle have accessibility issues (usually missing 'alt' text on images, or missing heading structures), and are therefore difficult to access and utilise using assistive technologies.
- Most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software.
- Not all videos have captions.
