Screen reader accessibility feedback from Indiana University

[Corrin Clarkson]

Hello,

I just met with the Indiana University digital accessibility experts. Here are some notes they gave me on the PreText sample that I shared with them:

• The permalinks create a lot of semantic noise for screen reader users and make navigating with a keyboard more onerous. They demoed a script that ads a button to the top of the PreText page to toggle the permalinks on and off.
• The different navigation panels are all labeled as navigation which makes navigating by region confusing. It would be better if these had more descriptive labels like "table of contents". This was a best practice and not a violation of the ADA law.

Best,
Corrin

[Rob Beezer]

Dear Corrin,

Thanks very much for passing this along. It is extremely helpful to us to hear
about the results of relevant university offices doing these sorts of evaluations.

The permalinks were reworked recently and are seeing some refinements. In
particular, a recent pull request (merged two weeks ago) addressed the
accessibility aspects (and I'd bet it was not fully rolled out in time to make
it into your sample).

https://github.com/PreTeXtBook/pretext/pull/2581

Rob

On 7/16/25 14:27, Corrin Clarkson wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I just met with the Indiana University digital accessibility experts. Here are
> some notes they gave me on the PreText sample that I shared with them:
>

> * The permalinks create a lot of semantic noise for screen reader users and

> make navigating with a keyboard more onerous. They demoed a script that ads
> a button to the top of the PreText page to toggle the permalinks on and off.

> * The different navigation panels are all labeled as navigation which makes