7.3.2: Fill in the Blanks Workarounds
Overall Usability
Usable with Workarounds: most users will be able to use the activity.
Fill in the Blanks Workarounds
Task Description
Example Task description :
Complete the blanks with the present tense of the verbs in bold .
The Task description field is intended to provide instructions for the activity. However, the Task description field also acts as the label for each Line of text. These labels are used by assistive technology. While visually, the Task description only appears once, in an activity with multiple Lines of text, users of assistive technology encounter the Task description repeated as many times as there are Lines of text in the activity.
The Task description should be short because it is also the label used by assistive technology for each Line of text. While the Task description field includes text formatting options, the text formatting is not part of the label used by assistive technology.
Do not use italics, links, lists, headings, or any other text formatting options in the Task description field if the text formatting conveys structure or meaning.
Text Blocks and Lines of Text
Example Line of text:
Every day, I (to wake up, to put on) early because (to study, to attend) classes at the university in the morning.
Fill in the Blanks activities are organized by Text blocks called Lines of text. Each Line of text has limited content formatting options. Content authors can use Lines of text to separate activity questions. However, Text blocks do not support numbered or bulleted lists or headings within each Line of text. The text formatting in Lines of text should be limited to normal text as much as possible. Bold text can be used when the use and meaning are described in the activity Task description.
Activity Instructions
Example activity instructions: The verbs appear before each blank space. Some of the subjects are in brackets. Example: Dr. Pérez (to work) works in the Los Angeles clinic. The Fill in the Blank activity does not provide an accessible option to include detailed instructions for the activity and correctly label activity elements for assistive technology. Detailed instructions should be added in the first Line of text instead of the Task description.
Blanks
Example Blanks:
Every day, I (to wake up, to put on) early because (to study, to attend) classes at the university in the morning. The Blanks in the Fill in the Blanks activities are edit fields. The information associated with each Blank should always appear before the Blank. This way the information associated with each Blank can serve as a text label. When the text labels for Blanks have multiple options, use a comma instead of a slash to separate the options. Commas are easier to read with assistive technology than slashes.
Textual Tips
Example Textual tip: (to wake up, to put on) to wake up, to put on Blanks are automatically labeled for assistive technology as “blank number of total blanks.” “Blank number” is the order of the Blank and “total blanks” is the total number of Blanks in the entire activity. If an activity has 16 Blanks as answers, then the first Blank is labeled “blank 1 of 16.”
To be accessible, the label for the Blanks should provide users of assistive technology with enough information to understand how to interact with the edit field. The information related to each Blank appears in parenthesis before the Blank but is not associated with the label for the Blank.
Since “blank 1 of 16” is not descriptive enough, a workaround is to include the information related to each Blank as a Textual tip .
The Textual tip should include the answer options in the text label. These will usually be the options in parenthesis. The Textual tip should also include any additional text related to the Blank. For example, if the subject of the verb is in brackets, [she], it should also be in the Textual tip. Please note, the Text Override for the tip label should be updated to better describe the text label. In this example, the tip label should be changed to “Verb to conjugate”. Similarly, the label for the tip icon should be updated. Instead of “Tip”, the label should be “Verb”.
Behavioral Settings for Fill in the Blanks
The following is a list of Behavioral Settings options with suggestions to make the content accessible:
-
Automatically check answers after input
- Do not check
-
Put input fields on separate lines
- Do not check
-
Show confirmation dialog on "Check"
- Do not check
-
Show confirmation dialog on "Retry"
- Do not check
Text Overrides and Translations for Fill in the Blanks
In this example, the answers are verbs that need to be conjugated to match the context of the sentence. The following is a list of Text Overrides and Translations options with suggestions to make the content accessible:
-
Text for "Show solutions" button
- Show solution for Activity 1
-
Text for "Retry" button
- Retry Activity 1
-
Text for "Check" button
- Check Activity 1
-
Assistive technology label for saying an input has a tip tied to it
- Verb to conjugate
-
Tip icon label
- Verb