Overview

SoftChalk Cloud is an award-winning digital curriculum authoring solution that combines content authoring, learning object repository, hosting, and management features with an easy way to track student score results and the ability to integrate seamlessly with Blackboard.

Things to Consider

• People with disabilities make up the third-largest minority group in the United States—more than 40 million people.
• The Internet is either partially or completely inaccessible to many of the disabled and accessible websites can be difficult to create.

Embedded Media

• SoftChalk gives the instructor the option to add a text description for embedded media.
• It automatically generates the embedded media with a link to a separate document so that you can add your description.
• It also includes a link to the media that may be opened using an external player, which allows for easier access to player controls by students using screen readers

Colors

• Color combinations are selected by the instructor. Keep contrast in mind!
• Color is not used exclusively for information purposes.
  • Example: Feedback to assessment questions is given in both color and in graphic form.

Interactive Activities

• The interactive activities are built using HTML5, allowing students to use keyboard controls to navigate through them.
• In addition, for screen readers, SoftChalk automatically generates modifiable instructions for each activity

Images

• Images added to a lesson can have “alt tags” added, which allow instructors to easily add alternative text.
• Alt tags allow screen readers to describe an image that is used on a web page.
• Images used as spacers and for formatting reasons do not need alt tags; thus, they will be ignored by screen readers.

Pop-up Quizzes

The interactive pop-up quiz questions in lessons have been designed to allow easy navigation of the content by screen readers as well as keyboards

Navigation

The navigation features allow users with screen readers access:

• ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) tags, applied to lesson content for easier navigation by screen readers.
• A “Skip Navigation” link, provided at the top of each lesson page to allow easy navigation past redundant page navigation when desired.

Your keyboard can be used for navigation, if necessary

MathML

MathML functionality ensures that when math equations are used in a SoftChalk lesson, screen reader software can read the equation.

TextPoppers

• The pop-up text annotations created in SoftChalk are designed to be accessible by screen readers.
• All text annotations are generated with a link to a separate document containing the text for easy access by screen readers.