At the OU there has been an accessibility assessment of our use of the questionnaire module.

In summary these are the findings:

a) Most question types require a label that links with the id attribute of the control (e.g. <label for="myid">Label text</label><input id="myid" ....>).

b) A group of checkboxes or radio buttons require a fieldset, with the question text and the question number forming the legend.

c) The TinyMCE text editor has some known accessibility issues. It would be preferable for assisted technology users to just have a plain textarea in the essay question type.

d) The rate scale question type uses a table for layout of a grid of radio buttons. For assisted technology users this will be read out as a linearised list where the link between the column headings will be lost when reading each row. (PS there is a particularly clear explanation of this at http://webaim.org/techniques/tables/.) The suggestion to improve this is to add hidden text to explain which option is being read out.

e) If a user submits without answering a required question then the text 'You are missing required questions: ' appears within a red outline. The red outline is not used by assisted technology, whereas adjusting the text to precede it with the word 'Error' will help. Perhaps the wording could also be a little more user-friendly - 'please answer questions: '.

f) The line between the question and the answer could be argued to visually reduce the association between these items.

I attach a patch for your consideration that covers all the issues except c) (for which users can already choose to turn off the use of an html editor in their profile). The patch is based on the latest head version of questionnaire.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about this suggested accessibility improvement.