Accessibility

The Web Accessibility Initiative keeps an up-to-date and comprehensive list of policies affecting accessibility of web resources.

Of particular importance are policies and laws related to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In 2016, the US Department of Justice notified UC Berkeley that some of its online content, specifically that open to the public, was in violation of the ADA. This helped clarify what our roles as instructional designers are, and how important it is to make materials that are accessible and clear.

It is our responsibility to ensure that materials are accessible with respect to ADA regulations, but more importantly, so that they provide equal access to all our students and community.

Without regular access to a device or to the internet, both remote and distant learning have additional complications. Regular access may be compromised by you or your students having to share devices, or having weak or overloaded wifi at home, shared among household members. There are some basic principles of design that can help you address some of the potential problems.

Instructors: Design offline for online use

If your access to a device or to the internet is complicated, plan to create your materials primarily in offline mode, and use the internet and devices only when you need to:

• Create assignments and course materials in offline mode, suitable for later uploading or copy/paste.

• Download assignments for offline grading.

Students: Access online for offline use

• Design assignments and activities that can be done offline as much as possible.

• Make your materials downloadable.

• Many students use their phones for access to their courses; consider the design of your materials and their appearance on a phone (check them on your own phone, for example).

Improve your Bandwidth

There are ways to improve you internet access experience, even if your wifi is weak, or you are sharing it among others in your household:

• Turn off images, popups, or other browser plug-ins if you don't need them. Go to your browser settings-->privacy and security to find where to shut these things off.

• Check that you don't have apps or programs running that you don't need open.

• If using video conferencing, do not require students to use video, and go off camera yourself when your presence isn't absolutely necessary.

• Use an ad blocker to reduce the amount of material on a web page (note: this will limit your access to some sites, and you will have to whitelist the pages to see them -- this is particularly true of news sites).

• For video streaming, opt for lower quality if possible.

• If you have funds, buy a wifi range extender or booster.

• If your internet is delivered through a wired modem, you may be able to connect directly to it via ethernet. A lot of new computers don't have an ethernet port, so you'll need to get an adapter, but an ethernet connection is the most stable and typically the fastest.

• Refresh your router from time to time by unplugging it for 30 seconds to ensure the best signal.

Documents

Good document design improves usability for all students, not just those with reading disabilities or using screen readers. Good document design relies on clear hierarchical outline systems, readable fonts and color choices, and alternate text for images (see below). It's important to use file formats that are going to be easily readable on all kinds of systems.

MS Word

This is the most common document type, and is generally readable by most systems, even if they do not have the Microsoft program. Different systems, such as Google Docs, can read and import Word documents.

When creating Word docs for students, be sure you use common fonts, standard margins, and in most cases, black type against a white background. If your document has headings and subheadings, you might want to use the "Outline" function to create a hierarchy of headers, which makes it easier for screen readers to navigate, and for all users to understand. Microsoft has a guide for creating accessible documents.

PDF

PDF is a popular format for documents that are not going to require much editing, and are not generally thought of as editable by users. Course readings, syllabi, etc., are often suitable in PDF. The same principles apply to PDFs as to Word documents in terms of design. If you are using Acrobat to create your PDFs, it has a feature that allows you to check accessibility as well. Under the "More Tools" menu item in Adobe Acrobat, you will find an accessibility checker. Adobe provides a guide to PDF accessibility as well.

On bCourses, you can use A11y to check the accessibility of readings or course documents you share with students.

If you're curious how documents or web pages are read on a screen reader, look at this video created by the University of Washington.

Images

The most important tool you can use with images is the "alt-text" or alternative text feature when designing digital documents. This not only allows students with vision issues to use screen readers to hear a description of an important graphic, but also allows users limited by low-bandwidth to turn off images in their browsers and still see the description of the image.

The best alt tags are ones that describe an image fully. It's useful to think about how you would describe an image to someone who couldn't see it, and what they would need to know. For example, imagine you display an image of an historic map of California. Here are possible alt-text tags:

Insufficient: An old geological map of California

Better: A full color map of California showing locations of quaternary and tertiary sedimentary rocks, created in 1938.

If an image is used decoratively, indicate so in your alt tag. Some systems let you check a box in this case, or if you are indicating it by hand, a pair of quotation marks with no content ("") indicates a decorative image.

Audio/Video

In addition to providing captions and transcripts, it's important in audio and video creation to provide formats that are easily accessed on all systems. While some formats, like FLAC, are higher quality, they require users to download software to hear them. Mp3s are lower quality, but can be used by most systems. This article, "Audio File Types," explains the different formats and their popularity.

Video file types have the same issues. Some are high quality but not widely accessible. For example, .wmv, or Windows Media files, are not readable on Apple IOS or Mac operating systems. Mp4s on the other hand, are widely readable on all systems. This article, The 8 Best Video File Formats," explains more.

Read more about universal design at the W3's website.

If you are going to use videos in your online materials, best practices are that you provide captioning. There are several ways to do this. Links embedded in this list lead to how-to pages.

1. Use YouTube captioning. Here is information on adding your own or using and editing automated captions. YouTube automated captions are rarely 100% correct, often with hilarious results, so if you use YouTube to generate captions, be sure you review and edit appropriately.

2. If you host a session on Zoom, you can automate captions. Like YouTube's captions, these may not be completely accurate, so you need to read them through and edit them with a text editor.

3. You can also caption videos through Google Drive.

4. If you are using Camtasia, you can use the speech-to-text feature.

5. If you have funding, you can use a captioning service, such as 3Play Media. The turnaround time varies depending on how much you're willing to spend, from a couple hours to a few days. They also provide audio narration services, which provides commentary for users with vision disabilities.

There are several other tools out there to help you create captions. It's also helpful to provide a downloadable transcript of your video as well. This can be done by downloading the captions, or, if you've created a script ahead of time, using that as an accessibly formatted downloadable file.