Make Poll Everywhere More Accessible

Poll Everywhere can be a useful part of your toolkit as you create more accessible learning environments. You can use Poll Everywhere to offer alternate means for learners to engage with a topic, and to check and demonstrate their knowledge in quick formative assessments. Most Poll Everywhere activity types are designed to be accessible, with a few exceptions we’ll discuss below.

When creating or updating Poll Everywhere activities, follow good accessibility practices to ensure the activities you create remain accessible.

• Alt text for images in question titles: when you add an image to the question title, a space will appear just to the right of the image preview. By default, that space will show the filename of the uploaded image. Click in that space to replace the filename with a concise description of the image.
• Alt text for images in response options: when you add an image to a response option, you will see a space labeled “Alternative text” in gray, below the image and above the red “Delete image” button. To add alt text, click in that “Alternative text” space and type a concise description of the image.
• Color contrast: The default display colors for multiple-choice questions ensure sufficient color contrast for users with low vision or color vision deficiency. If you modify this color, test to ensure your color choice also has sufficient contrast.
• Color choices: Ensure that questions, response choices, and indicators of right/wrong answers are not indicated by color alone, but also include text or symbols to distinguish them.

Will all your students be able to engage with your Poll Everywhere activities?

A few simple steps can help make live Poll Everywhere activities more accessible for all your students, including those with limited vision or limited hearing, those who are neurodivergent or have a cognitive disability, and those who can’t use a mouse or touchscreen:

• If you’re showing the question on a projected display, read the question out loud (along with its answer choices, if applicable). Not all students in the room may be able to see the projected image equally.
• If you’re projecting a presentation in the classroom, give students the option to view and respond to the activity from their own devices, so they can use their own assistive technologies to support their needs. Allow sufficient time for all to respond before proceeding.
• If the projected questions or answer choices include images, describe relevant features of those images aloud as well. If students will view the images on their own devices, make sure those images include alt text as described in “Things to check” above.
• For multiple-choice activities, let students know how many response options they will choose from.

Clickable image activity types

Activity types that involve clickable images can present significant barriers for users who are blind, have low vision, and/or use keyboard-based navigation. Besides the Clickable Image activity type itself, this can also include the Emotion Scale, Select On Map, and 2x2 Matrix activity types.

At the same time, clickable image activities can be hard to replace. Instructors have created some very innovative, insightful and engaging experiences with them. Here are some ideas about alternate approaches that could help you make Poll Everywhere’s clickable image activities more accessible:

• Humanities instructors will sometimes present an image of a text passage, ask students to click on words that have particular meaning or resonance in the passage, and thus generate a clickmap or heatmap for further discussion. Unfortunately, images of text can’t be read by text-to-speech tools, and even providing alt text doesn’t help a student drop a pin or click on the desired location in the image.An alternative approach would be to create a document (i.e. in OneDrive/Word Online or Google Docs) with the same text, and invite students to drop highlights or comments on the word(s) they wish to indicate. The density of highlights or comments would simulate the heatmap, but this would be more accessible for students who use screenreaders or alternative input devices. A collaborative annotation tool like hypothes.is might also be a useful platform for this activity.
• For activities like the 2x2 Matrix or other clickable activities based on a two-dimensional graph, consider presenting the axes with values (i.e. 0 to 10 or -5 to +5 on each axis). In this way, a person who can't see and/or click on the axes could still identify where they would plot their answer [i.e. “my answer is (6 on the x axis, -2 on the y axis)”]. This could be an alternative way to present and answer the same question: you could reframe the clickable activity into a pair of multiple-choice questions, but get the same qualitative output.
• Another alternative approach for any type of clickable image activity would be to consider asking students to answer these poll questions in pairs. That way, if one partner is unable to see the content or drop a pin, the pair can discuss the image's features and decide together where to drop their pin. If you take this approach, don't single out students with disabilities/accommodations to be paired up with a partner, but instead pair up everybody in the class so all can experience the discussion and creative friction of the activity.