Piazza is a student-driven question and answer service that some instructors use for their courses. Students can collaboratively work on answers by adding, modifying or deleting content. Instructors can view students’ questions and answers, post their own questions and answers, and endorse the best responses. The University of Wisconsin-Madison selected Piazza as an addition to the Learn@UW suite of teaching and learning technologies to complement existing tools in the Canvas learning management system (LMS).

Get help

• Contact the DoIT Help Desk for general assistance or to report an accessibility or usability barrier.

Additional resources

• Instructions for enabling Piazza’s accessibility mode

Accessibility & usability barriers 

The following information is provided to help people with disabilities know what potential barriers may exist.

Magnification barriers create difficulties perceiving information for some users, such as people with low vision

When content is magnified at and above 200%, some elements begin to become crowded or get pushed off of the screen and lose functionality.

Screen reader barriers may created difficulty for some users, such as people who are blind or have low vision

Some elements in the activity lack screen reader announcements, such as some menu options or confirmation of some actions such as favoriting or following posts. Labels are not always associated with text fields or other form elements in a way that screen readers will announce together and will be announced separately. The Statistics activity completely lacks screen reader support.

In the accessible version of Piazza, there is still a lack of status updates on favoriting or following posts, and there are sometimes screen reader announcements that do not have a visual equivalent in the activity, so the experience will be different for visual and screen reader users. 

Keyboard barriers may create difficulties accessing content for some users, such as users with motor disabilities

There are also some functions that don’t behave as expected with keyboard interaction, such as radio selection options. Additionally, there are instances of initial focus starting in the middle of a page and low contrast visual indications of keyboard focus.