Accessibility

ADA Compliance

Key Takeaways from the report:

Lessons learned from campuses nationwide have informed an approach to compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act during the process of online course design.
Providing multiple ways for students to gain knowledge, demonstrate knowledge, and interact goes a long way toward making a course accessible to all students, including those with disabilities.
Accessibility efforts benefit not only students with disabilities but also students who are English language learners and those working in noisy or quiet environments.

Alt text

How a screen reader will describe an image?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XTUgbGG8fs5ha8fd6NXPSVo5CkNkO_f1Jw/view?usp=sharing

How would you describe this image?

Those that are blind, use a screen reader to navigate websites and documents. Images are (obviously) unable to be seen. Alternate text or alt text is the only way that a screen reader can convey the meaning of an image… by reading text that serves as an “alternative” for that image.

Best practices for ALT text from Ohio State

ALT Text in Word & PowerPoint

Insert your image
Select it
In the top menu, go to Format > Picture
In the sidebar, click on Layout and Properties () > Alt Text
Enter your descriptive alternative title

ALT Text in Pages & Keynote

Insert your image
Select it
Click Format in the upper left corner ()
Select image
Enter your descriptive alternative title in the description

Colors

Kaskaskia - accessibility color.pptx

As for color, black text on white background is always best, but it you feel the need for embellishment, you can check color contrast.

Those that have color blindness, forms include Protanopia (red), Deuteranopia (green), Tritanopia (blue), and Monochromacy (no color), need color contrast to determine imagery…. But when designing content you do not have to convert all of your images to black and white to check contrast or get rid of your images entirely, but you need to make sure colors are not your only method of conveying important information.

If you have an image that needs to use color to convey information, you can check your image using a variety or resources.

Check the contrast of two colors for text

Website check for color blind

Image check for color blind

Semantic Document Structure

Using heading styles, descriptive link text, and list styles gives physical, structural, and consistent format to your Word document that makes it accessible to people who navigate with a screen reader. When you convert an accessible Word document to PDF format, the accessibility features remain.

Practice adding structural format to a Word document (.doc) (courtesy of Dr. Marc Thompson at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign).

Screen Readers with PDFs

Adobe Acrobat for PDFs

Open PDF
Tools
Action Wizard
Make Accessible
Start (will ask you for alt text in process)