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)
Accessibility Resources
There are many great resources to help you learn how to make your resources accessible.
Testing Accessibility
NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access)
Additional Resources
Universal Design For Learning (UDL) Guidelines
Open Washington OER Tutorial: Module 9: Accessibility
Stanford’s Online Accessibility Program (SOAP)
Canvas – General Accessibility Design Guidelines
COOL4Ed Accessibility Review Criteria
COOL4Ed eTextbook Accessibility Reviews
BC Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit
Getting Started with Website Accessibility
Cheatsheets for creating accessible content in Microsoft, Adobe, and online
Attributions:
Open Washington OER Tutorial: Module 9: Accessibility , Open Washington, licensed under CC BY 4.0