I teach part-time, and I use Blackboard with Jaws. Blackboard is 
accessible, but it takes a while to get used to, even for sighted users. 
Some things don't seem very intuitive to me, and others are fine, but 
unnecesarily clunky.

the best way to learn it is to use ctrl+home to get to the top of the 
screen, then to arrow all the way down to the bottom. Have your friend 
do this every time he clicks on anything until he gets the hang of 
what's on the screen and where new things appear. Generally speaking, 
the new information appears near the bottom, but this may vary, 
depending on the way his campus has set up Blackboard.

I teach at two institutions. Both are using the same version of 
Blackboard. I have few problems with Blackboard at the community 
college; things are nice and stable there. At the university, however, I 
find lots of frames and get some losing of focus. Since my Java got 
updated, Firefox does much better than it used to, but Internet Explorer 
is only slightly easier to work with.

As far as the general layout, there are headings that help you jump from 
area to area. Then you arrow-down from the headings to find the options. 
What's confusing is that the options appear to be repeated. You might 
hear, "link Notifications" and "link Expand Notifications." If you press 
enter on "expand notifications," you get a list of options, like maybe 
Create or Edit. If you click on "Notifications," you may get the same 
list of options, or you may open up a new content area near the bottom 
of the screen. I haven't found a consistent way of predicting which is 
going to happen.

Again, where the new information appears and how to find it with Jaws 
varies. At the community college, the new options, like Create and Edit, 
appear right below the "Expand Notification" option, and when it's time 
to do something big, like typing the subject and content of a new 
notification, I use heading navigation to jump to a Create Notification 
heading near the bottom of the screen.

At the university, however, the new information in both cases appears in 
a frame near the bottom of the screen, though in different places, and 
Jaws doesn't jump to it when I press the letter M. The other odd thing 
that happens at the university is that Jaws doesn't always announce 
links as links, but using left-mouse simulation works.

There are many parts of Blackboard I haven't worked with. A student sent 
me homework through Blackboard last Fall, and I never found it. I don't 
have enough experience with it to know if the problem is me or 
Blackboard. I've actually found good help information online. In some 
cases, it's posted by the IT departments at universities. In other 
cases, it's the official Blackboard help. I type strings like, 
"Receiving notifications, text messages, blackboard." Most of the time, 
the steps are very clear, so I can explore the screens and use virtual 
find to locate text strings.

I don't know how helpful this was.


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