Does the English course include any ADA features?

NOTE: For detailed information, see our NROC English Accessibility Guide, which includes the option to download the NROC English VPAT.

Developmental English includes closed captioning (cc) for all of the videos, including the Worked Examples (in the Resources area). Additionally, this course is implemented in HTML5 so it can take advantage of the accessibility tools that are built into your browser and operating system. These include tools to manipulate the display of text elements (including increasing their size).

The Developmental English Player is a javascript based player built with GWT (Google Web Toolkit). Unlike traditional HTML content, the content is not exposed as normal HTML elements in a text file. The player dynamically builds everything in a tree in memory (called the DOM) for playback.

This trend of building things in Javascript is becoming more and more common, so there are Web Accessibility Standards for exposure of dynamic JavaScript to screen reader technology. The standard is called the ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Application) standard. This standard is relatively new and is only partially adopted by various screen readers. We have done extensive testing with Jaws, NVDA, and ChromeVox and have found that ChromeVox has the best ARIA support.

Further ADA enhancements will be considered as we complete ADA testing.