Embedded Files
Digital Accessibility
Becoming website ADA compliant and removing barriers for those with disabilities.
What is Digital Accessibility?
Digital accessibility is all about ensuring everyone can equally use and access digital materials like websites, apps, documents, and electronic devices, regardless of their abilities.
<< Check out this video to learn what digital accessibility means in 60 seconds.
How will digital accessibility impact my job?
We are all expected to:
Begin to embed accessibility into creating, publishing, and sharing CDOR content internally and externally.
Collaborate with the Digital Content Specialist or OIT TAP Team to learn about accessibility requirements.
Reasonably adopt WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards in the creation of CDOR websites and documents.
Consult with the Forms and Graphics Department to review document accessibility before publication.
We are not expected to:
Be an expert in web/digital accessibility.
Produce materials that will be perfect and completely free of accessibility issues.
To love accessibility 100% of the time.
Give up on making our web pages cool and exciting to make it accessible .
Ignore the accessibility basics that have been shared.
Creating Accessible Webpages
Best Practices
DO:
DO NOT:
Use headers, and use them in a chronological order.
Our website page titles are at Header 1. The first header you should select is Header 2 in your layout, and then H3 and so forth.Strip text when pasting from Google or Word.
Use Control + SHIFT + V to strip when pasting text. Restyle in Drupal.Use alternative text for images.
Provide a visual description of what is happening in each image. Paint a picture with words.Sparingly use images with text embedded.
Make sure the alt text includes the embedded text in the image.Videos with images with embedded text need a voiceover.
Assistive technology cannot read pictures with embedded text.Provide a text transcript and captions for video files. The downloadable text transcript link should be immediately following the video.
Create text-only PDFs that are 1-3 pages as web pages.
Work with Forms and Graphics Dept to remediate PDFs that need to remain as PDFs.Write the content at a 5th grader reading level.
Use clear and straightforward plain language. Should legal language be required, include definitions when possible.Make text links a minimum of 3 words.
Longer clickable areas help those with mobility issues.Make text links open in a new window.
Toggle the arrow by "Advanced", move the switch to the right to select "Opens in a New Window".Be descriptive with the display text on text links.
Avoid "click here" or "read more." Describe where the link is going to lead the user, such as "... to view XYZ Policy (PDF)."Keep color contrast high.
Always have dark text on light backgrounds, or white text reversed out of a dark color.Use <ul> or <ol> tags to style a bulleted list.
Do not paste a bulleted list from Google or Word and just use spaces to create the illusion of a bulleted list.
Do not skip headers or style the headers on a web page haphazardly. If you want a header/subhead to be smaller than, say Header 2, please use the "Normal" font style and change the font size.
Do not skip using headings. Do not create the illusion of headers utilizing only font sizes and weights.
Do not paste text from Google or Word without stripping it from the styling attributes first by adding the SHIFT key to the Control + V keys.
Do not skip alternative text for images or describe an image as "screenshot". Put yourself in their place.
Do not create videos with text embedded in the video and only background music playing. Visually-impaired individuals have no way of knowing what the video is about.
Do not attach non-compliant PDFs to the websites.
Do not scan documents/PDFs and post as an image / PDF in lieu of highlightable text. Always create HTML text pages when possible.
Do not write difficult or advanced vocabulary so people with cognitive disabilities can understand the content.
Do not make text links one word long.
Do not say "click here" for text links, especially multiple times on the same page.
Do not use colors that are close in color value. They have a low contrast. When in doubt, view as a grayscale to see if the contrast makes things legible.
Accessibility How - To and Resources
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