Accessible Video and Images
Accessibility for Academics
Optimizing Video and Images for Accessibility
Video is an amazing tool for teaching and learning. It can provide instructors who feel they do not have the greatest lecturing capability to provide powerful yet succinct lectures (as in a flipped classroom) and provide others with an archive of the lesson that they can then share with students that missed it. Similarly, the old adage that "A picture is worth a thousand words" still rings true.
However, in terms of accessibility, simply uploading the video to a video hosting site (like Panopto) or adding the image to a webpage is not enough. With the former, a student may be hard of hearing or be in a situation where they cannot listen to the video with sound on. With the latter, screen readers will act as if there is nothing there, making it so that students that are hard of seeing cannot enjoy the same context as other students that the image provides.
Accessible Video and Image is Accessible to All
In general, we need to begin to realize that many of our students and even our colleagues may use some sort of assistive technology, even if they are not forthcoming with that information. A better explanation is provided in the Accessible Text lesson, but suffice it to say, for Canisius to meet students where they are, we need to recognize this and start doing our part to make our courses more accessible for all of our students.
This lesson will cover several tools, which you already have access to, that can help make video and images accessible.
How this Resource Works
This site is a self-paced development resource covering accessible videos and images 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 videos and web pages within content management systems (such as D2L) that are globally compliant with web accessibility standards.