MiniLessonAccessibility

Note on Copyright and Acceptable Use

In these lessons special care is taken to conform to copyright and fair-use guidelines. In all my teaching, I try to keep myself constantly aware of these guidelines. In producing teaching and educational materials, I always use a creative commons license as indicated by this designation:

Accessibility Analysis

The following tools are used in this mini-unit:

Wikispaces: http://www.wikispaces.com/

Google Docs: http://docs.google.com/

Bubbl.Us: http://www.bubbl.us/

Wikipedia: http://www.wikipedia.org/

Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/

UNSW - Transition Signals: http://www.lc.unsw.edu.au/onlib/trans1.html

Using WAVE (http://wave.webaim.org/), I analyzed each tool for accessibility.

Wikispaces: http://www.wikispaces.com/

- No accessibility issues. All pages are accessible to the fullest degree possible.

Google Docs: http://docs.google.com/

- The login/sign-up front page has five major accessibility errors which would limit use by screen readers. I also checked a document created in Google Docs and found that although navigation had no accessibility errors, the text of the document was unreadable to screen readers. Forums on the subject suggest that Google is working on this and similar issues and a resolution may be made soon.

Bubbl.Us: http://www.bubbl.us/

- This webpage has at least six major accessibility issues that completely prevent use by screen readers. It is a totally flash-based tool.

Wikipedia: http://www.wikipedia.org/

- Although this site is largely accessible, individual Wikipedia entries may contain accessibility errors. This is due to the open-source nature of the content. Some contributors may enter empty tags, unlabeled links, and javascript.

Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/

- The main page is accessible, although there are some javascript elements present which may confuse a screen reader. However, the search results page contains many accessibility problems. A typical search result yielded twenty major problems.

UNSW - Transition Signals: http://www.lc.unsw.edu.au/onlib/trans1.html

- This page was perfectly accessible. No errors are present. University-produced web content tends to be more accessible than other sites because universities tend to have heightened awareness of accessibility issues.

The lesson activities have no accessibility issues besides those present in the above tools. Activities are verbal/textual in nature and can be done with minimal accommodations.