Digital Accessibility of H5P Virtual Tours

H5P virtual tours have digital accessibility features built-in to accommodate users with differing abilities. If a virtual tour user is unable to use a mouse or pointing device they can navigate between hotspots in a scene. To keyboard tab close to the virtual tour use can use the ‘h’ key in NVDA which jumps to the next heading landmark. The you can use the ‘tab’ key to jump between hotspots in the virtual tour. When you tab to the next hotspot NVDA will read it’s label aloud and you can choose to follow the hotspot link by clicking ‘enter’. If you open a YouTube video hotspot all video controls become accessible via keyboard tabbing including the closed captions button.  Activating  the closed captions button will display captions aiding users with hearing disabilities.

Navigating through hotspots in a virtual tour with the keyboard and NVDA

Here’s an example of tabbing through the hotspots in the Universal Design Home Virtual Tour. While tabbing through the hotspots of the first scene here is the text that read aloud by NVDA:

  • 1st hotspot: “Full Screen button –  press enter to activate”.
  • 2nd hotspot: “Clickable ‘Entryway’ button”.
  • 3rd hotspot: “Clickable ‘untitled’ text button”.
  • 4th hotspot: “Clickable ‘Universal Design Home Entryways’ button”.
  • 5th hotspot: "Clickable  ‘Universal Design Principles Video’ button”.
  • 6th hotspot: "Clickable ‘Principals of Universal Design Quiz’ button”.

To go back to a previous hotspot, you can use ‘Tab’ + ‘Shift’. Here are some additional keyboard commands for controlling the NVDA screen reader that can be helpful:

  • Control + Alt + N = turn NVDA on.
  • Insert + Q = quit NVDA.
  • H = jump to the next heading landmark.
  • H + Shift = jump to the previous heading landmark.
  • Control = Stop reading aloud.
  • Insert + or Numpad + = Start reading continuously from this point on.

For more information about NVDA key commands see Deque University’s article about NVDA Keyboard Shortcuts. The H5P virtual tour content type is described as accessible in the content type recommendations page and is also listed as accessible on Penn State’s H5P & Accessibility page.