The UM System Pressbooks instance, as part of our partnership with Unizin, has adopted the Pressbooks Accessibility Assist Author Tool. This tool is designed to help Pressbooks users notice and fix accessibility issues as they create or edit their Pressbooks content. Below are a video and a written guide for using the tool. For further information, please see the Pressbooks guide on using the Accessibility Assist Author Tool, as well as the Pressbooks guide on addressing flagged issues.
Video: Pressbooks Accessibility Assist Author Tool
When viewing a Pressbook, users will see an icon showing the number of issues and a tooltip describing the issue (see Fig. 1). Though the icon shown in Figure 1 is red and white, the icon may also appear as yellow and black or blue and white, depending on whether Pressbooks has classified an issue as serious or not.
Figure 1: Pressbooks Accessibility Assist Author Tool in Viewer
When users hover over the flag icon, they will see options to open an Accessibility report in a new tab and to view a headings/alt text checklist (see Fig. 2).
Figure 2: Expanded view of Accessibility Assist Author Tool, with report and headings/alt text options visible
The Open Site Reports in New Tab option opens the Accessibility Report for that book in a new tab (see Fig. 3).
Figure 3: Pressbooks Accessibility report, with items not expanded
Selecting Check Headings and Alt Text displays any issues with headings and/or alt text in the viewer. For example, here we see a document with two Heading level 1 items, as well as a Heading level 3 item with no Heading level 2 between it and the Heading level 1 (see Fig. 4).
Figure 4: Heading issues shown in the Pressbooks viewer
A user can select each displayed item and also tab between the tooltips displayed within the text.
To address these issues, the user will need to enter the editor.
Accessibility alerts in the Editor
When editing their Pressbook, users will see the same icon showing the number of issues, along with a tooltip describing the issue (see Fig. 5).
Figure 5: Pressbooks Accessibility Assist Author Tool showing a red flag and seven issues
Hovering over or selecting the flag displays the option to check headings and alt text (but not the option to view the site report in a new tab). Selecting the list icon next to it brings up a list of issue types (see Fig. 6).
Figure 6: Pressbooks Accessibility Assist Author Tool issue types
Selecting the number will take you to the first issue Pressbooks has flagged (see Fig. 7).
Figure 7: Accessibility Assist Author Tool tooltips example
Users can then navigate between issues by using the arrows below the tooltip, tabbing through the tooltips, or scrolling through their chapter to find the next flagged issue. Alerts can be hidden by selecting the flag icon; reselecting it will show the alerts again. It's important to save your changes after making them; sometimes the Accessibility Assist Author Tool widget appears on top of Save, so it needs to be moved aside to access Save.
Like any tool, the Accessibility Assist Author Tool is just a tool; you may find that there are circumstances where you need to disagree with its suggestions to make your content fully accessible.
If you wish to disable alerts temporarily and you are the administrator of a Pressbooks book, select Settings and Editoria11y, then, under the Basic Configuration setting, locate Checker mode inside editor and choose Hide checker while editing from the dropdown. To save this change, select Save Settings at the bottom of the page (see Fig. 8).
Figure 8: Option to hide accessibility checker while editing a book
Book-level reports
Editors and administrators for Pressbooks books can pull an accessibility report for their book from the Viewer, shown above, or from the Editor. If a user is editing their Pressbook, they can access their accessibility report by selecting Content Toolkit -> Accessibility Report from the left-hand navigation menu. Once the accessibility report is open, users will see an option to download their report as a CSV file (see Fig. 9).
Figure 9: Download Accessibility Report as a CSV file
Items to note about the report include:
- Reports may not instantaneously update after changes were made.
- Reports typically show pages opened recently; if you expect an issue to show, we recommend opening the page where that issue is located and then regenerating the report at a later time.
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