Accessibility: Text Markup
Accessibility for Academics
Optimizing Text for Accessibility
We compose text every day in emails, scholarly production, reports, letters, syllabi, assignment instructions, and other course content. When we write these messages, documents and web pages, can follow a set of practices that ensure our text content is accessible for the broadest array of students, including motor-impaired, vision-impaired, or neurodiverse. In this guide, we discuss ways to format text so all students can read it, however they read it.
There are many excellent references and resources available for anyone interested in creating accessible text content. We have listed some favorites in the Further Resources page of this guide. But in this resource we are focused on creating accessible course materials for Canisius college students, which includes (but is not limited to) syllabi, assignment instructions, disciplinary content, discussion prompts, and even emails.
Accessible Text is Accessible to All
In general, producing more accessible text requires us to:
recognize that students using assistive technologies different from video screens, mice, or touchpads experience the internet differently, in ways that are not always obvious. For example, when listening to the contents of a webpage read out loud, or navigating a page via keyboard, students may experience that page in more linear fashion, versus a student scanning and scrolling the page visually and with a mouse.
discover and use features already available to us. Software makers increasingly add features and options we can use to ensure documents or web pages we create are accessible. In many cases (such as in this Google Site), the developer has built a lot behind the scenes to work automatically, so we need not bother ourselves with more technical or complicated accessibility work. But we still need to take active steps to ensure what we create is making best use of features in software, rather than just assume that because a content system (such as D2L, or Google Sites) boasts accessibility, it is all taken care of for us.
commit to improving our course content for all students, in accordance with our institutional values and a practice called Universal Design for Learning (UDL). What we do for students with impairments or nontypical circumstances is worth while for its own sake, especially as we are committed to inclusivity as a Catholic, Jesuit principle. But improving our writing methods for accessibility with such features as topic sentences or descriptive subheadings will benefit all of our students.
How this Resource Works
This site is a self-paced development resource covering accessible text development in a series of pages. Each page is available via a navigation menu at the top of the screen. Also, pages have "Next" and "Back" links at the bottom so that the entire site can be treated as a linear, page-by-page guide. The last page features a proficiency quiz, that can help you get a sense of whether you have grasped the major themes and important points within the guide.
COLI periodically updates it's resources so this guide will occasionally change. We expect to improve it regularly. Major changes are listed within the site's Change Log, and the "Last Updated" date reflects when the last changes were made. The Change Log, together with a list of further resources on the topic, can be found under Site Resources in the upper menu.
The resource is not a complete guide to requirements for web accessibility under Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (as amended), or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Nor does it contain complete guidelines for developing websites or long-form professional publications. Links to more comprehensive resources are available in the site's further resources page.
This site serves as a guide to assist faculty in developing content that is accessible for students at an inclusive university, particularly in formats such as documents (.docx, Google Docs, .pdf) and web pages within content management systems (such as D2L) that are globally compliant with web accessibility standards.