CalcPad Accessibility
May 2026 we launched our revision of our CalcPad, featuring brand new accessibility tools! Below are some of the highlights.
Heading Navigation
The CalcPad problem display is now organized using Headings, which allow easy navigation of the problems. Here's how it's structured:
- Heading 1: Assignment or Page Title
- Heading 2: Primary Areas (Assignment Information, Problem Listing, Problem Shortcut List)
- Heading 3: Problem (each individual problem is a heading 3)
- Heading 4: Problem Areas (Problem Text, Problem Image, each Problem Part, Help Links)
This allows you to navigate in and out of problems rapidly.
Answering Shortcuts and Hints
As you go through the parts, we have made sure that voice over gives an accurate picture of where you are and what things you can do. We have added keyboard enter support to answer questions without needing to go to the Submit (except on multiple select where enter or space selects, then you need to tab over to the submit button).
Answering a question also leverages the aria-live to alert you if you got it correct or not, as well as aria tags help the screen reader know if you got it correct or not.
Lastly since the problem parts may have a limit on the number of guesses, that information is also given to you as you answer.
Media and Equation Accessibility Integration
Lastly, our new CalcPad works with our new Media and Equation accessibility features. Images will contain the standard and verbose descriptions and image captions (and in the future, tactile images), and while we still need to rebuild all the problems to leverage this, the CalcPad does allow our screen reader friendly Equations to be rendered and navigated.
Audio Help for problems also has the transcripts for the audio present as part of our migration.
Thank you for your patience while we still work to rebuild our over 1000 problems.