Please hire neurodivergent user experience designers, D2L needs help

L.C.118

Currently, D2L is an accessibility quagmire and is currently so difficult to use that the process of elucidating all the things wrong with it would completely overwhelm me. If I feel like this, I'm certain other neurodivergent students are also experiencing difficulty. It is good that Brightspace is aware of web accessibility standards, however there are more accessibility standards of which to be aware. A user experience designer would be able to assist in keeping D2L accessible for everybody, and if that person were neurodivergent, they would inherently understand the non-option of making an inaccessible product, such as D2L currently is. At the absolute minimum, you could add dark mode. You could also cache text entered into boxes so that if some unfortunate student doesn't know to take information out of D2L to work on it, all their hard work on something like a discussion post isn't erased by a login token timing out.

Please, please, please hire someone like a user experience designer to improve your product. I absolutely love learning, but D2L makes me hate to engage with my college. My teachers and professors have a difficult time using it as well, and I began to have more empathy when I did some searching and found that the most in-depth information was on REDDIT. It should be on your site, and correctly optimized for search.

It's also worth noting that this site is in a font accessible for those with dyslexia, and D2L is not. Please help students all over the world by improving your product to a minimum, unified standard.

I'm also aware of the User Experience Research Program, and I am of the opinion that you need this voice at every point in your development process. This research program doesn't do enough to include disabled students. Please also be aware that there may be user feedback which you need to go looking for. People with disabilities have done a LOT of writing and spent a lot of time explaining accessibility, and it may not have necessarily been via this feedback site which will necessitate that you widen the scope of your search beyond your current tunnel-vision feedback sessions.

Krizzy.S.9720

Hello @L.C.118,

Thank you very much for taking the time to share your thoughtful feedback with us. We truly appreciate you raising these important points about accessibility and the user experience in Brightspace. We want to assure you that accessibility is a critical priority for us, and your feedback helps us continue to grow and improve. 

Accessibility is integrated into the end-to-end product process at D2L. We involve people with disabilities in product development and we have in-house experts with lived experience of disability. We welcome every opportunity to understand the challenges of our users with diverse needs and to provide a good learning experience.

We have forwarded your comments to the appropriate teams, including our Accessibility and User Experience groups, for further review. In the meantime, please see some relevant resources:

• Accessibility category serves as a single point of access to three avenues in Brightspace Community leading to the Accessibility Academy, Accessibility Library and Accessibility Discussions.
• We report our conformance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 at Level AAA on our website. We work with users of native assistive technologies at every stage of our product process through partnership with Fable.
• Brightspace Community website has an Accessibility Gateway that leads to an Accessibility Academy with several courses on accessibility for educators to support learners with different constraints such as low vision, blindness, etc. 
• While most of these courses are available to customers under login, the Accessibility Lab course is accessible to everyone.
• ReadSpeaker® is a text reader integrated into Brightspace, which can be activated with a licence. Learners with ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and dyscalculia can listen to course content, quizzes, discussions, and assignments while watching highlighted text for multimodal reinforcement.

We also often see students reaching out to their institutions’ Accessibility Office for support they can provide. Is this something you have access to?

Thank you again for being a strong advocate for inclusive learning environments. Your voice matters deeply to us.