provide easier chat reading for screen reader users in accessible chat activity

Passing on to Raj because he his working on similar issues.

Hello Greg,

I was revisiting this issue and it seems changing definition list to table might not look reasonable. Also, it might not be easy to show events (User xxx has left this chat) in table form.

Although, I can add a checkbox to let user turn-off time for better accessibility. What do you recommend?

Hi Rajesh,

One of my colleagues, a screen reader user, and I came up with the table idea to make it easier to quickly navigate the discussion. If you make the table like this

<tr>
<th scope="col">Person</th><th scope="col">Message</th><th scope="col">Time</th>
</tr>

<tr>
<th scope="row">Greg</th><td>Hi!</td><td>12:00</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<th scope="row">Sam</th><td>Hi back at you!</td><td>12:01</td>
</tr>

When the table is set up this way, the screen reader user can point their virtual cursor at the second column and simply scroll up and down that column. When they do that the screen reader will automatically read the person's name along with the message. The name is automatically read because they have focused to a row with a different heading. This way, also, the time is only read if the person wants to read it. Most people probably don't want to hear the time information when following a conversation.

In the case of a system message, you could make the line something like this.
<tr>
<th scope="row">Notification</th><td>Greg has left the room</td><td>12:02</td>
</tr>

Thanks for the feedback Greg,

Will check with integrators to see if we can change chat html. As this can break existing Theme's.

Added integrators to discuss best resolution for this issue.

Without looking at the html changes.

Can we change the html in the "accessible chat activity" to make it work as advertised - I think so.

Raj has not been able to work on this. I'm cleaning it and preparing it for the new Scrum backlog process.

I'm shifting this issue into a new Epic issue, where we are collecting together accessibility issues.

Bumping this to the current sprint because the solution is there (thanks Greg) and coding it will be straightforward.

If we change the list for a table then it will break the existing chat themes, especially the third party ones. Is that ok? Imo if the issue is back-ported to all supported branches it's not a viable solution.
I tried to put the current template content into the first cell, but I still lose part of the css. So I can't see changing list into table working.

Another possibility that I can see is duplicating the info into a hidden panel for people to read it easily (not sure that it's accessible friendly).

Finally we can make a specific accessible theme (with a bit of specific "hack" js for this accessible theme) - it may be the best option for now.

If theme support is a concern let me go take another look at it to see if there is another solution that doesn't require as many fundamental changes.

Hi Greg, my bad I was working on the non accessible chat.

Greg I didn't add the notification string (first column). I think the notification messages are enough (user1 entered, user1 left, user1 beep you all...).

This issue is missing testing instructions.

I was going to say that you should be using html_writer but that whole area is riddled with echo html in strings so what you have is fine.

You probably want to remove the commented out code //$output->basic = '<dl><d....

I'm not particularly bothered which you choose but choose one style of white spacing around the string concatenation.

<td class="cell c3">'. $message->strtime .'</td>

<td class="cell c3">' . $message->strtime . '</td>

Put this up for integration review once these things have been dealt with.

thanks Andrew.

Sent to integration. Greg that would be good if your colleague could test it (either you can cherry-pick the changes, either you can wait for the issue to be "Waiting for testing" status then go on qa.moodle.net).

Thanks guys - this has been integrated now

Thanks Jerome - passing this now.

Cảm ơn!

Your changes have now been merged upstream in git and will be available on the Moodle download sites shortly!

Một hai ba, yo