Miro Accessibility Information

Miro is a collaborative white boarding tool and online workspace for that enables teams to collaborate and build on the platform’s digital canvas to conduct meetings, design products, and brainstorm ideas.

Affected Users

Accessibility issues with Miro will primarily affect students and instructors with low vision, blindness, or color blindness, and students using keyboard support. People using screenreaders will face the most significant barriers. People with low vision or color blindness, and people using only a keyboard could still reasonably be expected to use the service, though there are certain barriers they should be made aware of, and alternate means of participating should be an option.

Known Accessibility Barriers

Screenreaders

Some non-interactive content is not reachable by screenreaders, text alternatives on some images, graphics, and controls are often placeholders and not specific. Areas impacted include:

Status indicators for the user’s current frame, non-interactive elements like headings, current state of controls and fields are not accessible via screenreaders.

Other problematic controls include "Insert shape," "Border style, opacity and color," "Lock," the "light yellow" color button, the Talktrack counter image, and the dot above board history.

Status message are missing when the search results update in the Template picker.

The “Close” button for the Recording tool relies on the sole use of color to communicate information.

Contrast

In most cases, color and text contrast meets accessibility standards. Exceptions include: Tooltip icon controls, focus indicators for multiple controls, ratings emojis for rating controls, the border of cyan sticky note element in the creation bar, the “copy link” button, and some buttons and plain text on the Dashboard.

Keyboard

For keyboard users, some of the content reflow requires two-dimensional scrolling when viewed on a screen with a smaller viewpoint size, such as a smart phone. Standard or large screens are not impacted.

The keyboard gets trapped on the “X” Close button for the Playback tool when using keyboard tab navigation.

Alternate Access

Due to the nature of the service (Miro is a collaborative, dynamic white boarding tool), people using a screenreader will experience significant barriers. For live collaboration, they should be allowed to provide ideas and insights orally or through an alternate means such as Word. Further, for collaborations using Miro, someone should be available to describe and read what is presented on the board. Students using screenreaders should not be assigned independent tasks in Miro and should instead be provided an alternate means of participating in and completing the work through one of the IT’s supported Microsoft services.

Less frequent issues for people with color blindness, low vision, people using only a keyboard may also require a similar alternate means of completing the assignment independently.

Communication

An accessibility statement should be included on the syllabus noting the accessibility barriers for students using screenreaders and keyboard support, or users with low vision or color blindness. Students should notify the instructor immediately, and the instructor and department should contact AccessibleNU promptly.

Suggested statement may include: "Miro has some known accessibility issues related screen reader and/or keyboard only use. Should you encounter accessibility issues using the tool, please contact your instructor ASAP for alternative access options."

Additional Support

The instructor of the course is responsible for implementing the alternate access solution and the department the course is within is responsible for providing any support in creating alternate versions of assignments or in proving human support.

They can contact Accessible NU at accessiblenu@northwestern.edu and Teaching & Learning Technologies at canvas@northwestern.edu if guidance is needed.

For student(s), contact AccessibleNU at accessiblenu@northwestern.edu.

For faculty, staff, or the general public, contact the Office of Equity at accommodations@northwestern.edu