Improving the Ability to Select Vantage Titles at Course Creation

Improving the Ability to Select Vantage Titles at Course Creation*

By Isabel Cheng, Sr. Product Manager, and Jonathan Hritz, Sr. Product Manager

The Challenge

When creating a Vantage course, users (e.g., instructors or course coordinators) are required to select a book title. They can do this in two ways: 1) by selecting "Search for a title by author or title name," or 2) by selecting "Browse for a title by discipline." Using the default "Search for a title by author or title name," users can begin typing a title or a name and a drop-down list of search results will appear. This feature is used frequently by sighted users, but for those using their keyboards and/or assistive technologies (AT) such as screen readers to navigate the site, the drop-down search list was not apparent or accessible. In other words, AT users could not know which search result option they had selected without using a mouse. Navigating to a specific search result using a keyboard was possible, but  the visible focus (which indicates where the cursor is on the screen) was insufficient, and screen readers were not able to call out the correct options and user selections.

The Solution

To remediate this accessibility issue, we significantly increased the visible focus on the title-search drop-down list and adjusted the screen reader functionality so that AT users can now accurately hear which search result options they have selected using their keyboards and screen readers.

Example:

*Published 11/22. © 2022 Sage Publishing. All rights reserved. All other brand and product names are the property of their respective owners.