Publisher Tool Comparison for a College Accounting Course

The days of flipping through a hard cover textbook are long behind us. Today teachers assign online textbooks which use sophisticated web-based tools that work along with the book, otherwise called publisher tools. These tools allow students to work on homework problems in ways that are more engaging and interactive, even offering support when needed. Since these tools live on the internet, they must abide by Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 accessibility standards. One would think that this means they are accessible to low vision users, but as I will demonstrate in my comparison of two products for an Introduction to Financial Accounting, publisher tools fall short. I will compare Connect by McGraw Hill and MyLab Accounting by Pearson. These products both meet basic web-accessibility standards; however, based on the tasks that students must complete, WCAG standards are not sufficient to ensure accessibility.

Publisher tools are companions to the digital version of the textbook that can be accessed from within a website. For example, the textbook website may provide the student with hints when they are stuck on a question, or it may provide video explanations of concepts, and links to the e-book pages that correspond with a specific problem. A student can complete a question in many ways: multiple choice, typing in an answer, selecting an answer from a drop-down menu, or dragging and dropping their choice of possible answers onto the screen. Publisher tools may be barely accessible, fully accessible, or somewhere in between. I will examine two textbooks in a similar introductory accounting course with their publisher tools, these are:

• Fundamentals of Financial Accounting, 7th edition (New York: McGraw Hill, 2022) by Phillips et al. and its publisher tool, Connect

• Horngren’s Financial & Managerial Accounting, 7th edition (New York: Pearson, 2022) by Miller-Nobles et al. and its publisher tool, MyLab Accounting

I will compare common accessibility features for low vision users, which include the following: font adjustment, read-aloud, alternative text, text-wrapping, scrolling, and table formatting. Each publisher has different solutions to these issues, and some are more or less effective for the student.

Font Adjustment

Font adjustment settings are very important in publisher tools for a visually impaired student. Typically, visually impaired people prefer larger fonts. Sans serif fonts such as Arial tend to magnify with greater fidelity, than serif ones, such as Times New Roman. Pearson’s MyLab allows students to change the size of the font and the typeface (serif or sans serif). There is also a choice to change the contrast. Light mode, sepia, or dark mode are available. The sepia mode is made to look like a physical book (beige color) with gray text, so the contrast is not as high as in light or dark mode. Line spacing can also be adjusted, which helps reduce visual clutter, and eases reading.

McGraw Hill’s Connect allows the user to change the font size but not the type of font. Most of the book is written in a serif font such as Times New Roman, which can be more difficult for low-vision users to read. Pearson’s font adjustment settings are better overall because they are more customizable than McGraw Hill’s.

Font Adjustment Settings Video Demonstration

Read-Aloud Feature

A textbook’s read-aloud feature is critical for visually impaired students. They cannot read as fast with their eyes as their typically sighted peers. To level the playing field, these students rely either on audio-supported reading or auditory reading to improve their reading speed. Audio-supported reading means that the student is using both vision and hearing simultaneously, while auditory reading refers to using only the auditory modality. A good read-aloud feature in a publisher tool will meet three key criteria. The first is word-to-word correspondence: the words on the page are highlighted as the audio is playing. This helps low-vision students follow the written text along with the synthetic voice that is reading out loud to them. The second criteria is the ability to adjust the speed of the voice because blind and low vision users listen to books at fast speeds to be efficient, typically much faster than a human can speak. Lastly, there should be an easy way to rewind or fast-forward with enough precision to locate a single sentence or paragraph. This gives the user flexibility and control, comparable to the way a peer skims material to review.

Pearson’s online textbook and MyLab Accounting tool’s read-aloud feature works, but it does not allow the user to easily rewind or fast forward to a particular sentence in the book. The user must rewind or fast-forward by 30-second increments in the audio playback, which is an imprecise method to locate text. It applies time-based logic, as one might use in a video, rather than location-based landmarks, which is how all readers typically navigate text.

There is also no word-to-word correspondence or highlighting for audio-supported reading. Although Pearson’s read aloud does not provide the ability to easily find text within the online textbook, there are aspects of the textbook which are effective. For example, the user can adjust the speed of the voice.

The Connect tool by McGraw Hill does not have a robust read-aloud feature. One can change the speed of the voice, however, there is no word-to-word correspondence. Instead, there is a bar alongside the paragraph which is being read. Unfortunately, the voice stops reading when one scrolls down on the page. When a student needs to scroll down to see the rest of the words in the paragraph, they can easily lose their place. There is no easy way to rewind and fast-forward in the read-aloud feature. Instead, there is a progress bar for the user to slide the bar forward and backward, but this tool is not precise.

Read-Aloud Feature Demonstration Video

The paragraph correspondence in Connect is indicated by a black line in the left margin, however, MyLab Accounting has the better read-aloud feature because the rewind feature is easier to use than the imprecise progress bar in Connect.

Alternative Text

Another important feature used by visually impaired persons is Alternative Text, or “alt-text” which is a verbal description of an image. It helps low-vision users when the text of the audio description is also displayed visually because some persons use both modalities. Every single picture in a textbook must have alt-text for the book to meet accessibility standards. Every picture that a sighted person can see should also be accessible for the blind and visually impaired user. If there are words in the image, the words should appear below the image in Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This means that the font and font size of the text within the image should be responsive to adjustments and capable of being read aloud. If an image of a table is presented in an accounting textbook, the table should also be available in OCR.

When using MyLab Accounting, there are alt-text descriptions for some of the images, which can be reached by clicking on the image. The alt-text can also be listened to with the read-aloud feature. In addition to providing the user with a visual version of alt-text, a larger version of the image is also provided. Unfortunately, the images are blurry when magnified meaning the resolution is low.

Connect provides alt-text descriptions for some of the images which respond to the read-aloud, but there are no visual words of the description displayed. Unlike Pearson, the image cannot be made larger by clicking. When using magnification, the images become very blurry. Since the images of accounting ledgers contain small text and numbers which are not in OCR, this key information becomes unavailable to the user.

Below see Alternative Text Video Demonstration

Pearson’s MyLab Accounting wins the alt-text comparison because the alt-text displays both visually and aurally. Both platforms have room for improvement to create clearer images since higher resolution can easily solve this problem. In addition, designers can create clearer graphics that will not pixelate when magnified.

Text Wrapping

Changing the size of the window is very important for low-vision users. When a page is full screen and a student uses magnification, the student will need to move their cursor from left to right across the screen to read: this is called panning. Panning across the screen back and forth can cause fatigue, dizziness, and motion sickness. To minimize panning, low-vision students make the window size narrower so that they do not strain their eyes and become fatigued. When the window is narrowed, it is imperative that text wraps. Some homework questions on Connect by McGraw Hill wrap and some do not. Below is an example of a question that does not wrap properly. The words and the table cut off, making it impossible to read without panning.

Below see Text Wrapping Video Demonstration

Scrolling

Scrolling is moving your cursor up and down to see the content on a screen. Like panning, visually impaired students try to minimize scrolling for the same reasons: it creates dizziness if done repeatedly in rapid succession or for an extended period of time. When text is magnified it inevitably leads to more scrolling. With MyLab Accounting, there is a pop-up menu with all the information that is required for each homework question. Although this minimizes scrolling, the user will still have to click in and out of the pop-up menu multiple times to retrieve the information carried over from a previous problem. There is no way for the pop-up to open in a different tab, it opens in the same tab as the homework problem and creates a lot of motion. If the information was available in a different tab or window, then the user could see the information side by side, which would avoid the motion of opening and closing the pop-up window.

Below see Scrolling Video Demonstration

While using Connect, students must scroll up and down repeatedly to reference information either in a table or in a previous problem. While this is inconvenient for sighted users, it has more significant consequences for visually impaired users. Motion has a dizzying effect on the low vision student. Magnified material causes more searching, and this scrolling motion consequently leads to eyestrain.

Transposing is re-typing or copying information from one source to another. Low vision students try to avoid transposing as much as possible due to the increased risk of error, which can lead to getting the whole problem wrong. A publisher tool that does not rely heavily on transposing is ideal, but accounting is a very detail-oriented subject that requires transposing numbers. So how do the two publisher tools handle the transposition of numbers and data entry?

MyLab Accounting carries the values from one question over to the next to prevent transposition. With Connect, transposing is a constant struggle. If a question references numbers from a previous question, the student must go back to the previous question, hold the numbers in memory, then re-type them into the next question. Sometimes the problem will ask the user to retrieve and re-type a dozen numbers they entered three questions ago. This back-and-forth retrieval of numbers leads to skimming and searching which inevitably causes visual fatigue. This is not a reasonable task for a low-vision student.

Formatting Tables

Creating accessible tables is especially important in accounting or any STEM-based subject. Visually impaired users rely on grid lines in a table so they can more easily distinguish columns and rows. Tables should also have less space in between columns to minimize tracking across. When a student is using magnification, they will have a hard time tracking the account title (left column) to the dollar amount (right column) because it is easy to lose the label to number correspondence when the visual field is reduced. In Connect, tables do not have gridlines, while MyLab Accounting has clear gridlines on the tables.

Below is an image of Connect tables which uses faint alternating gray and white highlights to create lines instead of gridlines

Below is an image of MyLab tables which contain clearly marked gridlines.

Workarounds

Publisher tools should aim to address accessibility issues, even when low vision users comprise a relatively small section of the college population. Until publishers carefully consider the needs of the low vision population, there are some workarounds that I have found helpful over the years.

To prevent scrolling and panning while doing homework problems, it can be helpful to split the same question across two screens or devices. For example, if a question asks the user to transpose data from a financial statement into another table, having the financial statement on one screen and the rest of the question on the other screen allows the student to see the information side-by-side. Since publisher tools are usually restricted to one user, the student can ask the publisher of the textbook to provide a second login. The professor might have to change some settings on the second account so that the questions are the same as the ones in the first account.

To help with transposing and skimming through large, complicated tables and word problems, a human reader can be beneficial to visually impaired students. A student may ask the human reader to read aloud certain parts of a question or find particular information in a table that requires skimming so that the student can use auditory information for transposition. A student might say to a human reader:

“For number 2, can you tell me what the total assets are?”

“For part 4, how much money was spent on the building?”

This helps the student listen to the numbers and confirm with the human reader that the value transposed is correct.

Another workaround for transposing numbers is a number keypad. If a student’s keyboard does not have a number pad, they can add a Bluetooth number pad to connect to their laptop. The layout is like a calculator and set up in a 3 by 3 grid. It might be easier to type numbers with the number keypad than trying to find the right number on the top row of the QWERTY keyboard.

Below see a Bluetooth number keypad for a Mac computer.

In addition to these methods, there are also Google Chrome browser extensions that can help improve the contrast of the website the user is viewing, which in turn helps with transposing and skimming because students can see the content better. One of them is called High Contrast. Students can either change the text/background combination or enhance the current display settings by selecting the Increased Contrast option.

Below see McGraw Hill Connect website without Increased Contrast setting (blue text on white background).

Below see McGraw Hill Connect website with Increased Contrast setting

MyLab does not need a Chrome extension due to the high contrast already provided (black text on a white background).

Another Chrome extension that improves contrast is called Dark Reader. This tool is also capable of changing the font size and the type of font as well.

Below see the Google Chrome extension icons: High Contrast, Dark Reader and Beefy Text.

My Recommendation

According to my analysis as a digital media critic, MyLab Accounting by Pearson is the more accessible publisher tool for visually impaired students. The read-aloud feature is better because one is able to change the type of font, which cannot be done in Connect.MyLab Accounting also has a pop-up menu for each question which minimizes scrolling. The publisher tool also has more pronounced gridlines than the white/gray highlights in the Connect tables. Since MyLab offers better contrast, users do not need to use the Chrome extensions. Students can see the alt-text descriptions and sometimes an OCR version of the content within the image by clicking.

In conclusion, both publisher textbooks and tools are considered accessible according to the WCAG 2.0 standards, yet there were considerable differences between them. A deep dive into the features which they each offered demonstrated that accessibility varied widely. Accessibility should be defined by the task that is required of the user by the specific content. Accessibility cannot be met with a cookie-cutter standard of what is minimally acceptable. Tasks such as skimming, transposing, and searching for information with imprecise tools, can become unreasonably burdensome when magnification is not factored into the task or when important information within images is not accessible. This comparison shows that textbook product managers and software engineers need to think about how to make tasks accessible early on in the design process so that users of diverse abilities can have a positive interaction experience. When designers consider the needs of a specific population, like low vision students, greater accessibility can lead to improved learning for all.