Xerte and switches / The Grid 2

Hi

We're a Scope funded college and recently started using Xerte for staff training.
I've just had an initial meeting with the Assistive Technologists to look at the feasibility of using Xerte with some of the more able students. Students here generally use switch technology and The Grid.

We were using keyboard only to get an idea of how suitable this might be and had a few initial questions...
Is there a shortcut key to allow a user to jump to the bottom right hand corner 'next/back' navigation?
What css would we need to change to increase the width of the highlight boxes, and/or change the box border colour?
We looked at the hotspot image connector with text pop-ups, but couldn't find a way to close the pop-up window?
On an embedded YouTube clip we couldn't focus on the play button. To get around this, could we set the YouTube to autoplay on load? I can't get '?autoplay=1' to work within Xerte (I'm also aware that I've read about this recently but can't find it or remember the outcome.)
We also couldn't work the audio on a 'graphics and sound' page, using the keyboard.

For interest... as a screen reader, a lot of our students use Read&Write Gold. Xerte worked OK in IE using Read&Write Gold but not so well in Chrome - which typically, is the browser of choice, here.

As I say, this was an initial, and thought provoking meeting.

Many thanks
Vicky

Hi Vicky
Really helpful feedback - many thanks. Here are some comments/observations to try to pin down where the problems might be occuring:
Is there a shortcut key to allow a user to jump to the bottom right hand corner 'next/back' navigation?
I'm not a Grid user so not sure if Grid does this but we have used ARIA landmarks for navigation, body and title areas of the LOs. Screenreaders can access this. Not sure if Grid2 is compatible with ARIA landmarks?

What css would we need to change to increase the width of the highlight boxes, and/or change the box border colour?
That's one for the technical forum rather than me I'm afraid.

We looked at the hotspot image connector with text pop-ups, but couldn't find a way to close the pop-up window?
This must be a Grid specific issue because I've just gone to page 3 of this LO (hotspot image connector)and navigated to a hotspot, opened it, read it and closed it again all using only tab, space bar and enter. This is on IE9 and Chrome v31

On an embedded YouTube clip we couldn't focus on the play button. To get around this, could we set the YouTube to autoplay on load? I can't get '?autoplay=1' to work within Xerte (I'm also aware that I've read about this recently but can't find it or remember the outcome.)
Yes - Ive just tried and had the same issue. I think the issue isn't so much Xerte but the video player that Xerte is embedding. I'll ask the developers if there are other options we could consider because that definitely needs to be accessible without a mouse and it certainly has been in previous incarnations. Thanks for alerting!.

We also couldn't work the audio on a 'graphics and sound' page, using the keyboard.
Again that seems to be a Grid issue not a Xerte one because I can start and stop the audio on this page with both IE9 and Google Chrome using only tab and space. I needed Shift tab on Chrome to move focus back to the player control.

Hi Alistair

Thanks for your response.
I've just had another look. We were jumping between screen readers and browsers at the time and I've clearly got confused at some point, I do apologise. You are quite correct, keyboard navigation does include closing pop-up windows in both IE and Chrome, although there is no coloured highlight box in IE making it a little tricky to know where you are sometimes.

Our issues clearly occurred when using Read&Write screen reader. This can be a bit fussy in Chrome and we had very little success with the Xerte / Chrome / Read&Write combination.
It was in IE that Xerte and Read&Write did work but we lost some of the focus points, including closing the text pop-ups and audio controls.
Clearly, there's nothing we can do about this but at least we know what it was now.

I do wonder about tab sequence though, for next/back navigation. On a plain text page, there is a minimum of 6 TAB key presses to reach the NEXT button. Would it be totally illogical to go to back/next before the help/screen size/accessibility/contents buttons? Just raising the thought, really.

Realistically, it looks unlikely that we will pursue this at the moment as there just isn't a great enough need to justify the time required. The Grid ticks enough of the boxes for our students, for now. This was an interesting exercise, however, and I hope it might be of use to you at some stage.

Many thanks
Vicky

Hi Vicky,

Just to expand on Alistair's answer regarding Youtube play button. We've tried to reproduce this and although Alistair and Ron both experience the issue in Chrome, myself and Julian Tenney, despite being on the exact same version of Chrome (well me anyway).

I can definitely tab through to the play button and pressing space plays the video so not sure what is going on there but it seems to be browser/system specific - I think it needs further investigating though...

We could change change the tab order or possibly we just need to relocate the buttons to the top of the unstyled page (css will still place it as normal) so that it receives one of the first tabs.

John