Blackboard
Blackboard
Blackboard is a commonly-used course management system at UNC-Chapel Hill. Integrating content with tools for communication, assessment, and administration, Blackboard helps instructors create course websites. Blackboard's toolset is accessible to persons with disabilities, including the blind and visually impaired. However, instructors and other content developers using Blackboard should be aware of general accessibility issues, and particularly those that will affect users with visual disabilities, who may be dependent on screen reading applications.
Keep in mind that this document's guidelines apply to the Blackboard system itself, not to any specific files that may be placed in Blackboard. The content of a Blackboard course page may include items in a variety of formats, including PDF, Word, and multimedia objects. The accessibility of these is a separate – but equally important – concern, and by far the most frequent source of problems.
As of 27 July 2004, the current version of Blackboard used at UNC-Chapel Hill is 6.1.0. The next planned upgrade is to version 6.2.3. This document is intended to provide information for both versions.
When encountering a problem using assistive technology with Blackboard, the initial point of contact is the Department of Disability Services. JAWS users and Web developers should read Tips for Using Blackboard and JAWS.
Assistive technology users should be encouraged to use Internet Explorer 6.x. Mozilla is acceptable, but interacts poorly with JAWS, which was designed to interoperate with IE. A number of navigation issues exist with Netscape 4.x and other older browsers, and these should be emphatically avoided.
JAWS requires an additional utility to parse the Java accessibility API, which is necessary to use the virtual chat tool. Obviously, Java must be enabled in the browser as well.
Tips for Using Blackboard and JAWS 6.0 provides a number of useful suggestions for combining these two applications effectively.
© 2002-2004, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ITS.
Last revised: January 30, 2007.