Support multiple types of selection (e.g. verbs and nouns)

[timhunt]

Marcus, if you remember I asked you about this at the Global Moot in Barcelona, and you did not immediately reject the idea. The idea is to let the qusetion author set up more than one kind of highlight, so, for example, you could create the question:

Introduction: In the following sentence, highlight the [verbs] like this, and the {nouns} like this.

Question text: The {cat} [sat] on the {mat}.

With a question like this, when the person attempting the question clicks on a word, it does not just toggle on/off, but instead goes through off -> highlight 1 -> highlight 2 -> off. (For doing visual styling in an accessible way, I would copy the colours and rounded corner conventions from https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-66563 - there are some screen-grabs there.)

Thinking about how this might look on the editing form, it could be something like this mock-up:

... for an existing question with just one group, or for an extreme example:

I am not very happy with my choice of words there, so improvement suggestions welcome. (One thing I like about suggested design is that it makes it easier for people to discover the feature for how to group mulitiple words that are not part of the right answer - and also it gives more flexibility for which delimiters are used for that.

What do you think of this concept? If you think it is OK, then it might be a nice little project to entertain me while I am stuck at home.

[marcusgreen]

That is interesting. Indicating things through colo/ur is convenient but can raise accessibility issues, how could that be addressed?

[timhunt]

What we did for the core drag-drop question types was to round different corners of different groups:

Of course, with the standard drag-drop types there is an extra clue, which is that the items will only drop into the right spaces, which is an extra clue on top of the visual appearance. Here, there is nothing like that, so it is more important that the visual style is clear. Also, in this question type, for good reasons, there is less padding, so less space to round courners. Still, here is a rough mock-up.

How challenging this is depends on what the maximum number of differnet groups we want to support is.

[timhunt]

When we were trying to improve core qtypes accessibility, we tried some other things, for example different border styles, but that looked less nice, and was harder to tell the things apart.

[marcusgreen]

Sorry, I clearly didn't read your first post fully, setting the corners is good. One of the issues is that question creators may find the use of multiple types of braces confusing. It would be possible to indicate what type a word is using a similar technique I use with Gapfill where you click the Settings button. Unfortunately that feature is not documented :(

[marcusgreen]

See this for a way to indicating what category some text was in, i.e. noun, verb or whatever https://examulator.com/marcus/gapfill_popup.gif Which would be better done as an Atto plugin.

[timhunt]

The trouble with the pop-up is that it is a lot of mouse clicks to do anything. Just putting (various sorts of) brackets round it is a highly efficient way to make the questions, if you know what you are doing.

I can't imagine it being too confusing for users (but then I am a geek). At least it will be very clear, from lower down the form, which types of brackets you are trying to use - and we could even re-order the form to move those settings to right beside the question text.

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There is another accessibility issue. At the moment when students are attempting the question, the marking is hidden checkboxes, so there is sort-of a structure that a screen-reader could understand, for how the answer is being input. However, I am not sure it is really accessible.

Anyway, if you allow multiple states other than on/off, what is the accessible markup? (We could hide select drop-down menus, but that seems horrible.) I did some Googling, but I have not yet found anything that seems applicable to this case.

[marcusgreen]

There is an issue that I express as 'developers are not normal people', My number 1 guiding principle is that the basic functionality of the question type should be trivial to use for non geeks.

So long as I can give my elevator pitch of ... I can teach you how to use this question type if you can learn one 7 word sentance "Put square braces around the selectable words" I am happy, and this new functionality can be done without making that untrue (for basic use)

In addition I can really see how this functionality would be very useful.

I think I need to run a screen reader or text only browser to get my head around the current accessibility stuff.
As for more states, that is a good question.

[oucnelson]

HI Marcus,

Any further thoughts on this suggested feature?

[marcusgreen]

I am very interested in it, but it not on my to do list at all. If this gets delivered things might change https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-69730 < /humour>