There are several ways to make your H5P activities accessible for everyone. This will benefit all of your students, but will be critical for those with access requirements.
You can ensure your activities are accessible by selecting the correct settings, so students can access the content and participate in class activities.
Be mindful that H5P can only be used for formative assessments and never used for summative assessments.
Accessibility testing has been done on the most popular H5P layout and activity types including:
H5P has important settings that you will need to adjust manually so that students can have flexibility in how they will interact with activities. The following settings should all be activated for all of your H5P activities.
Enable FullScreen
Ensure activities can enlarge to full screen by always ticking the Enable FullScreen option when it is available. You will find this option under Behavioural settings.
Ensure you enable autosave for all content so students can save their answers and progress. This allows students to gradually work on activities, because if they log off they won’t have to start from scratch when logging in again.
To enable autosave, go to LTI settings and tick ‘Allow logged-in users to resume content’.
Important!
Do not make changes to activities once published from the backend as students will lose any information they have saved.
The LX Accessible Content Practices are a guide to help you make content accessible and find out how to help students in your subject with access requirements. Here’s how to apply them with H5P activities:
Content structure
Limit the number of interactive elements you add to a Canvas page so students can concentrate on the activity they need to focus on.
Include a combination of short and longer activities. This enables students to achieve shorter tasks and build capabilities and confidence or resume longer tasks that they can gradually work on.
Don’t put more than 2-3 activities per page and if the activities are longer ones only 1 per Canvas page.
Ensure you use the heading styles (levels 1-6) to demonstrate the hierarchy of your content in activities that enable you to input longer text. Using the correct heading styles for subheadings is important for people who use screen readers.
To add heading level styles in H5P:
Click the text field.
Under Paragraph Format, select the correct heading level.
The styles menu in the text editor.
Avoid changing the font, size and colour in the text editor to ensure your text is consistent, legible and not distracting for students.
It’s also important to add content as text rather than images of text, as students who use screen readers won’t be able to access the information.
Create meaningful titles so that students are clear about what the activity is. It is also vital to consider students who rely on audio technology provided by screen readers to read out the title (e.g. students with vision or cognitive impacts).
To enable this feature, follow this two step process:
Select activity title Metadata button.
Metadata button next to Title.
Always create a title that will Show label for Assistive Technology (AT) so screen readers can read out the title.
Title field that will Show label for Assistive Technology (AT).
Use clear and concise language when creating activities.
Explain new discipline-specific terms.
Provide instructions to students in plain English.
Any image you add to H5P that is part of an activity should have alternative text (alt text). It provides a text description of what is in the image for users who cannot see it.
To add alternative text in H5P:
Describe the image in the attributes box: Alternative text for the image.
Captions and/or transcripts benefit all students including non-expert users of English and are critical for students who experience hearing loss. To ensure captions correctly display on all videos added to H5P activities use either Kaltura MediaSpace or Microsoft Stream:
Kaltura MediaSpace
Create videos in Kaltura MediaSpace as you will be able to add/edit captions.
H5P only allows WebVTT files to upload separately to the video file to include captions, so you will need to convert the SRT files to WebVTT files using a free online caption converter provided by 3PlayMedia.
Upload the mp4 video file to H5P and the WebVTT files to work together.
In the tab for uploading the video there is an option to upload the WebVTT files. The audio file needs to be added as a separate file to the video for the subtitles to work.
In Available text tracks dropdown options select Captions:
A link refers to any section of text that can be clicked on to view other web pages, download documents or access external applications. It’s important that links are added clearly, so students can find them and know what to expect once they select the link.
In H5P, add descriptive link text in the Text field, so that links make sense out of context. This is critical for screen reader users and it can also make it easier to read for all students.
Be mindful of how you use colour – ensure there’s enough contrast between text and background, it’s not overwhelming and it’s not used to convey meaning alone.
For all text, use foreground/background colours that have high contrast. If you’re not sure about the contrast levels of different colours, play it safe by sticking with the default style colours.
Don’t use colour or shape as the only way to identify something in your document. Use text labels or descriptions instead.
Ensure you use written labels for graphs so students can distinguish graph features.
Ensure tables that are added to activities are clear for all students and accessible for students that use a screen reader by following these guidelines:
Never use a screenshot or an image of a table within any activities, as this will not be accessible by a screen reader. Create the table in text format.
Don’t use tables for formatting – only use them for presenting data.
Add header column/rows to data tables.
When adding a table H5P, always add a title and click Metadata to Show label for Assistive Technology (AT). The metadata title always needs to be added to show the table title for a screen reader.
Never use a table over a video in the activity Course Presentations.
It’s best practice to avoid flashing content or content that cannot be paused like GIFs. If you cannot avoid flashing content as it is important for your class, make sure you include a warning before the flashing content.
The Canvas Accessibility Checker does not work with H5P activities so you need to keep the LX Accessible Content Practices front of mind with any content you create.
Accessible formats
Students who use screen readers may find the following activities inaccessible or challenging and you may need to provide an alternative format.
