Accessibility

Moodle's goal is to be fully accessible and usable for all users regardless of ability.

This page describes the current state of accessibility in Moodle as well as our plans for the future.

Established practices

Moodle core developers spend a lot of time making sure new developments are accessible. Part of the process when building new code in Moodle is to follow established best practices and part of the process for accepting new code into core is to test pages carefully and gather feedback from experts.

Conformance to standards

The Moodle platform is a complex system with many parts. Its code is always evolving. Modules can be enabled and disabled. The interface can be heavily customised using themes and thousands of settings. Actual content can be produced by any teacher or any student. As such it is impossible to say with 100% certainty whether Moodle or any site based on Moodle is absolutely accessible or not. Accessibility is not a state, it is a process of continuous improvement in response to our users and the wider technical environment.

WCAG 2.1

When deciding how Moodle should present its content for best Web accessibility, the WCAG 2.1 guidelines are followed.

ATAG 2.0

As Moodle is a place to construct content (as well as consume content), we also refer to the ATAG 2.0 guidelines. In Moodle 2.7 a new editor Atto was added that not only helps to improve how everyone can use the editor itself, but also helps to improve the accessibility of the content produced with it.

ARIA 1.1

As many parts of the Moodle user interface are dynamic and interactive, we follow the ARIA recommendations to inform assistive technologies, such as screen-readers.

Section 508 (US)

As Moodle is used by US Government agencies, the US Section 508 amendment can be relevant to Moodle.

European Accessibility Act

As Moodle is used by government agencies and universities in the European Union, the European Accessibility Act is also relevant.

Discussions

One of the main places accessibility work is being carried out is on the Moodle Accessibility Collaboration Group mailing list, see http://collaborate.athenpro.org/group/moodle/.

There are also many discussion on issues in the Moodle Tracker.

Known bugs and issues

This is the main list of accessibility issues, organised by priority. This list is always changing.

See also

• The Moodle LMS achieves WCAG 2.1 AA Accessibility compliance - note (december 2020)
• Accessibility in the dev docs
• Accessible course design
• The Accessibility block is a Moodle additional plugin that provides options for changing text size and colour scheme. Settings can be saved to persist between sessions. Also integrates ATbar from Southampton University ECS
• Other accessibility related additional plugins for Moodle
• Orato is a free text reader which can be installed on your PC or run from a USB Pen Drive for portable use.
• this forum thread - Another way to look at it is that the Open University, UK, has more disabled students than all other UK universities combined, and we use a lot of Moodle quizzes, and only occasionally do we hear that a student had a problem with the mechanics of answering the quiz.
• this forum thread - about Customizing Moodle for Visually Impaired Students
• this forum thread - about an Easy-to-use free screen reader for accessibility testing