Accessibility Guidelines for Page Builder
Page Builder enables you to create pages that allow you to guide learners within the Skillsoft Platform. Like all Skillsoft Platform pages, we recommend that the pages you create meet accessibility requirements to ensure they are usable by learners with disabilities who may be using assistive technologies. Accessibility requirements concern the use of headings, images, colors, reading order, and other things. Page Builder manages some of these requirements automatically, but there are others that are the responsibility of authors or which can be affected by authoring decisions.
Because Skillsoft supports accessibility across the Skillsoft Percipio platform learning experience and related products, we offer the following guidance based on our experience measuring the accessibility of our products against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards issued by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Our aim is to provides guidance in how to use Page Builder features and good authoring practices to avoid accessibility issues.
Specifically, we aim to help you meet the accessibility requirements for:
Why should accessibility be important to you?
Skillsoft designed the platform to be accessible to all learners. This includes any who have disabilities that make it difficult or impossible for them to see the screen, use a mouse, hear audio content, read text, or process large amounts of information quickly. These learners may rely on keyboard access or use assistive technologies such as screen reader or screen magnification software to help them use a computer, read web pages, and access learning content. We recommend that the pages you create using Page Builder be accessible to these learners and compatible with their assistive technologies.
Additionally, your organization may be subject to legislation or regulations that require you to provide accessible content to learners, such as the following:
- Americans with Disabilities Act
- Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act
- Ontarians with Disabilities Act
- European Accessibility Act
What is accessibility in practice? The WCAG standards
The international standard for accessibility of websites and their content is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) from the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C). This is a collection of individual conditions, called Success Criteria, that state measurable requirements for aspects such as:
- Visibility of text and images
- Provision of text alternatives for people with no or low vision
- Provision of captions or text transcripts of audio content
- Ability to change the size and spacing of text to make it more readable
- Content understandability
Compliance with WCAG is a requirement of all accessibility legislation and is the basis for making your pages accessible.
How does Page Builder ensure pages are accessible?
Page Builder handles most of the WCAG compliance requirements automatically. For example, the text content you add will automatically have the ability to be read aloud by screen reader software or re-sized by learners. The video content you link to will automatically include captions, transcripts, and audio description. You don’t have to do anything to achieve this compliance.
There are some aspects which cannot be done automatically because they require human judgment. For example, if you include an image that provides information to learners, adding descriptive text associated with the image provides the equivalent information in text for users who cannot see the image. The judgment of what information an image provides and how to state this in text format can usually only be made by a human. Page Builder provides controls for the page author to provide appropriate alternative text for images. Screen reader software can then convey that text to visually impaired users.
For more information on how you can achieve accessibility with your page designs, see: