Hello Xerte community:
I wanted to put out this post in this particular forum, so that other screen reader users, especially Jaws users, could benefit from my short experience in working with Xerte.
My name is Leo, and roughly speaking, a month ago I was given an assignment in college, which basically consisted of building a short lesson by using an authoring tool. Up to that moment, I did not know anything about authoring tools, and the teacher of the course suggested a specific tool for all students. It took few minutes for me to know that this authoring tool was not accessible. So, I undertook the endeavor of finding out an accessible authoring tool. It was time-consuming and frustrating. I must have tried out more than a dozen apps. However, keys are always in the last place you look, aren’t they?
To make a long story short, during the last weeks I have been trying out XOT using Jaws 2022, and few days ago I was able to create a learning object by myself. Since I really did not know how an authoring tool works from a blind perspective, I must say that there is a steep learning curve for beginners who rely only on the screen reader to get the job done. In my case, I was mostly puzzled by the distribution of the elements and the content in the different pages that can be inserted.
As for technical considerations, Xerte is accessible, and in my experience, creating learning objects with the screen reader Jaws has been both effective and wonderful.
I am so grateful. I really want to thank all members in the Xerte team and all developers for working hard on this project to make this authoring tool really accessible. Indeed, different from most, if not all, authoring tools, Xerte has taken in consideration users of assistive technology.
