Blackboard Learn Accessibility Conformance Statement
Product: Blackboard Learn Release 9.1, Service Pack 11 (SP11)
Date: December 6, 2012
Independent Auditor: Deque Systems, Inc & Jim Thatcher
Per the requirements provided by the W3C, Blackboard makes the following claim of WCAG 2.1 conformance for a subset, specified below, of Blackboard Learn Service Pack 11:
On November 20, 2012, the web pages encountered in the following user activities all conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1, Level AA.
- Logging into the LMS
- Using the LMS as a student
- Change personal settings and colors
- Find and access a course
- Find and review content within the course, including multi-media (audio/video) content
- Contribute content to a course wiki, including uploading files
- Find, review and submit an assignment
- Find a test, read instructions, respond to all questions and submit the completed test
- Find and review grades
- Read announcement from the teacher
- Find, post to and interact with a course blog
- Find discussion forum(s) and participate in the conversations
- Using the LMS as a teacher
- Create content with in the course
- Create course content with conditional availability
- Create an assignment
- Create tests with different question types
- Reorder the items on the course menu
- Copy items from one section of the course to another
- Enter and manage course grades
- Grade student work
The technologies that this content "relies upon" are HTML 4.01, HTML Transitional, JavaScript and CSS3.
A third party accessibility consultant manually tested each of the pages encountered in the process described above against all WCAG 2.1 AA Success Criteria and provided details of and recommended fixes for each failure identified. Blackboard Development iteratively worked with the consultant to fix each failure until all identified failures were determined to pass and considered "Fixed". Blackboard Quality Assurance also conducted parallel WCAG 2.1 AA testing as part of their testing process and came to the same conclusion as the Consultant: On November 20, 2012, all of the above named pages pass all WCAG 2.1 AA Success Criteria.
There is one exception to the conformance described above. The rich text editor used throughout the product fails Level A success criterion 2.1.1 (Keyboard Access) for some, but not all, of of the formatting elements. Specifically, navigating the select lists for font type and size can cause the full page to scroll rather than moving through the options. This editor, called TinyMCE Version 3.5.6, is a third party component and Blackboard has no direct control over this technology. Blackboard is working with TinyMCE to ensure that the editor will meet Success Criterion 2.1.1 and be upgraded in Blackboard Learn in a future release.
Contact information for Independent Accessibility Consultant:
Deque Systems, Inc. POC - Preety Kumar 2121 Cooperative Way, Ste. 210 Herndon, VA 20171 (703) 225-0380, www.deque.com
Jim Thatcher POC - Jim Thatcher 709 Fletcher Street Austin, TX 78704 (512) 306-0931, www.jimthatcher.com
