Making Sure Your Resource Is Accessible

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Are Your Resources Accessible?

As instructors, we have legal and ethical obligations to ensure our courses are fully accessible to all learners, including those with disabilities. We use digital resources in our courses because we believe they enhance learning. However, unless carefully chosen with accessibility in mind, these resources can have the opposite effect for students with disabilities, erecting daunting barriers that make learning difficult or impossible.

WCAG 2.0

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 , developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, provide an international standard that defines accessibility of web-based resources. The principles of WCAG 2.0 are applicable to other digital assets as well, including software, video, and digital documents. The University of Washington has developed an IT Accessibility Checklist that can help anyone creating or choosing digital resources to understand the accessibility requirements related to the features and functions of those resources.

To learn a bit more about accessibility you can watch the following video:

Simply Said: Understanding Accessibility in Digital Learning Materials

Things to Consider

Use captions for videos. This helps many students for many reasons.
Provide alt text for images.
Don’t use tables for formatting (they are for data). Tables don’t translate well with screen readers
Use headings rather than simply making the text bold. Sighted people can scan a page for bold text, screen readers scan based on headings and styles.
Links are read out loud by screen readers so that text should be informative (rather than the hyperlink itself)
Don’t use color alone to convey meaning

Content adapted from WebAIM’s Introduction to Web Accessibility (copyrighted)