Five Tips for Accessibility

Want to make your courses more accessible? Here are five quick tips for improving the accessibility of your course material, which can minimize barriers and improve learning for a diverse population of students.

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• For images in written texts or a presentation, summarize the content or highlight any important details of an image or graphic provided, especially if it’s something information-dense like a graph or table.

• For images in digital material, add alt text to describe the content of the image. Alt text should provide an equivalent alternative to the image, and as such the purpose and context of the image will dictate what to include in the alt text.

• For images that do not contribute to the meaning (visual styling like borders or decorative icons), mark it as decorative so that screen readers will ignore the image.

• Avoid selecting media that does not have closed captioning or a script/transcript available.

• When creating your own media, consider creating a script that can be shared with learners.

• Submit videos to UF Captioning, or explore ways to add your own captions for videos.

Color choice, including contrast and an awareness of different kinds of color blindness, is especially important for students with low vision or color blindness, but intentional use of color increases readability for all users.

• Avoid using color alone to convey meaning. Color isn’t picked up by screen readers and may not be visible to students with color blindness, so essentially its use doesn’t translate for all users.

• Ensure high color contrast between the text and background. WebAIM provides an easy-to-use color contrast checker.

• For things like graphs, consider color combinations. Since there are different kinds of color blindness, it’s helpful to look at your colors in grayscale to see if they can be distinguished from one another or use a website or a browser extension that allows you to simulate different kinds of color blindness.

• Simple, sans Serif fonts like Calibri or Arial are easier to read and should be used for small text or large chunks of type.

• Serif fonts are more appropriate for adding visual appeal to large text like a title.

• Some users may benefit from specialty fonts like those made to support some people with Dyslexia.

• Text should not be too small to read easily: A good rule is no smaller than 12 pts for documents and no smaller than 20 pts for presentations.