Title: Accessibility for Digital Content
Course: Accessibility (Multiple LMS Version)

Overview

Module Overview

This module will introduce the participant to laws and regulations related to making online and blended learning materials accessible to all students. In general, teachers are made aware of student disabilities by the IEP (Individualized Education Plan). However, many students have disabilities that go undiagnosed or unknown, such as color blindness or impaired hearing. Teachers following the Universal Design principles are ensuring that all students have accessible curriculum. By the conclusion of this unit, you will have reflected on your own accessibility practices.

Requirements for accessibility:

- All videos captioned and audio files include transcripts
- All images include captions and alt text
- Tables have defined headings and not used as design
- Purposeful use of color that doesn't convey meaning
- Use of headers

Learning Objectives

In this module, participants will:

- Review relevant laws and regulations related to Section 508 and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
- Review concepts related to accessibility.
- Reflect on current practice and materials regarding accessibility.

Academic Vocabulary

The academic vocabulary you will encounter in this module is:

Section 508: Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act requires that all Web site content be equally accessible to people with disabilities. This applies to Web applications, Web pages (including online courses) and all attached files.

Universal accessibility: A requirement by law, ADA Section 508, that all students, regardless of disability, must be provided with access to equivalent learning materials, including interfaces, images, sounds, multimedia elements, and all other forms of information.

Universal Design: Broad-spectrum ideas meant to produce buildings, products and environments that are inherently accessible to both people without disabilities and people with disabilities.

IEP: An Individualized Education Program (IEP) is designed to meet the unique educational needs of one child, who may have a disability, as defined by federal regulations. The IEP is intended to help children reach educational goals more easily than they otherwise would, and is mandated by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). In Canada and the United Kingdom, an equivalent document is called an Individual Education Plan.

Closed Captioning: Closed captioning is the process of displaying text on a television, video screen or other visual display to provide additional or interpretive information to individuals who wish to access it. Closed captions typically show a transcription of the audio portion of a program as it occurs (either verbatim or in edited form), sometimes including non-speech elements.

Alternative Text (Alt text): Text associated with an image that serves the same purpose and conveys the same essential information as the image. This is often used in situations where the image is not available to the reader because they have turned off images in their web browser, or are using a screen reader due to a visual impairment.

IDEA Act: The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is a United States federal law that governs how states and public agencies provide early intervention, special education, and related services to children with disabilities. It addresses the educational needs of children with disabilities from birth to age 18 or 21.

This page on Accessibility by Jon Fila at Intermediate District 287 is licensed CC-BY-NC-SA. Based on a work from Leading Edge partners: @One, iNACOL

The Law: Section 508

If you are reading this then you are likely already interested in the topic of accessibility and want to do what is best for your learners. It is worth reviewing some of the legal aspects that led to these requirements...

In the past, PK-12 practitioners have not always implemented Section 508 accommodations unless they work with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and/or have students with an IEP. However, with 4 to 6 percent of all students classified as having specific learning disabilities in U.S. public schools, every teacher (online/blended/face-to-face) can expect to find students with learning disabilities in the classroom (Learning Disabilities Association of America, 2012). At a minimum, a teacher using the Internet for part of their education program is advised to be aware of the Section 508 guidelines and implement key practices related to accessibility. Later sections of this Module provide more specific details and recommendations for implementing key accessibility practices like Closed Captioning.

According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act requires that all website content be equally accessible to people with disabilities. This applies to web applications, web pages and all attached files. It applies to intranet as well as public-facing web pages. Section 508 also applies to online and blended learning due to the use of the Internet and websites to access learning. In 1986, Section 508 was originally added as an amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The original section 508 dealt with electronic and information technologies, in recognition of the growth in this field (Wikipedia, 2012).

Please view this brief video from the Federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on accessibility. Web accessibility encompasses all disabilities that affect access to the Web, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities.

Section 508 Technical Standards

- Software Applications and Operating Systems: Includes usability for people that are visually impaired. This can be accomplished by using keyboard navigation options, hotkeys, and mouseover functions.

- Web-based Intranet and Internet Information and Applications: Assures accessibility to web page graphics by the visually impaired using assistive technology such as screen readers and refreshable Braille displays. This is accomplished by using alternative text and descriptors for graphics and style elements for headers.

- Videos or Multimedia Products: Includes requirements for captioning of multimedia products such as training or informational multimedia productions. This can be accomplished by ensuring videos are captioned and have a transcript available. Keep in mind that a transcript for a video is not equivalent to captioning the video. Try watching a video with no sound first and then reading the transcript and see for yourself. You'll notice that they mention videos that are live streamed. Keep that in mind too if you're doing webinars or presentations, it can be costly for those live video captioning. As suggested elsewhere, captioning existing videos can be done on your own, or relatively inexpensively using a service like Rev.com.

A more complete list can be found at Section508.gov.

So, the good news is, that if you are designing (or updating) your content the way it will be suggested in the pages that follow, then you will be well on your way to making your content accessible.

This page on 508 Compliance by Jon Fila at Intermediate District 287 is licensed CC-BY-NC-SA. Based on a work from Leading Edge partners: @One, iNACOL

Introduction

Accessibility is the extent to which something is accessible and useable by all users, including people with physical disabilities or learning disabilities. In digital learning, accessibility also relates to making content usable on a wide variety of devices and operating systems, possibly without internet access.

Did you know...

About 10% of the U.S. population has some form of colorblindness, with the highest rate occurring among white males.^1 This means you likely have 2-3 students in each class who either cannot detect the difference between certain colors or see color at all.

1. Aao.org,. 'Caucasian Boys Show Highest Prevalence Of Color Blindness Among Preschoolers'. N. p., 2015. Web. 4 Mar. 2015.

Accessibility is for Everyone

While accommodating disabilities is a significant part of accessibility, making your digital content accessible benefits all students by making it more user-friendly and easier to adapt to their individual needs or learning style. Making all content accessible also accounts for the "invisible" or undiagnosed disabilities that you don't know you need to accommodate. Don't wait either - it's much easier to make your content accessible as you create it, rather than having to go back and fix it later.

Teachers, in general, must be able to recognize different learning styles and adapt assignments and the course. Online and blended teachers should pay special attention to gaining an understanding of each student's skills and challenges in the early days of an online/blended course. In an online or blended class, course content and curriculum is delivered through a learning management system (LMS) or other online repositories that archive course materials. Research and work using web resources (i.e. library databases, online journals, news sources, and social networking sites) are just a few of the ways in which students complete assignments.

At Intermediate District 287, we encourage the use of Moodle. One of the benefits of using this tool is that we can make it more accessible and practical for students with disabilities. We have options to edit core features that create for easier navigation that cannot be leveraged in other tools.

Communicating, collaborating and sharing knowledge between students and their teachers via assignment, quiz and forum modules; Google Docs; or email are considered necessary skills. If teachers have students with disabilities, they must know how to adapt course content and instruction to meet these students' needs. Providing adequate digital content for visually impaired, hearing impaired, or learning-disabled students can be a challenge without proper considerations.

Many are unaware of how widespread disabilities are in the United States.

- An estimated 3.5 million people age 5-17 have a hearing, vision, or cognitive disability.
- Roughly 36 million individuals have a disability, which is 12% of the population.

(Data are courtesy of the U.S. Census Bureau, 2008-2010 American Community Survey.)

This page on accessibility created by Jon Fila and Caitlin Cahill for Intermediate District 287 is licensed CC-BY-NC-SA. Based on a work from Leading Edge partners: @One, iNACOL

File Formats

Choosing File Formats

Web Content is Best

Web content, i.e. content that is entered directly into a web page on a learning management system (e.g. Moodle) or cloud-based repository (Google Apps, YouTube, etc.) is the best option for providing content to students. Web content will display on any device, regardless of operating system or software availability, and can be saved for offline access. (Keep in mind that not all accessibility features can be added to Google Docs/Slides, more on this later.) The text editors inside of a LMS convert your content into HTML, which makes it more flexible for any type of device.

Avoid Proprietary or Uncommon Files

Proprietary file types (e.g. Apple iBooks) or uncommon file types (e.g. Publisher) should not be used, as you cannot guarantee that students will have the software necessary to open the files. Even common proprietary formats, such as Microsoft Office, should be avoided, as forcing students to download content is just another opportunity for students to "get lost" or give up if they have to locate the download or find an app that will open the file. We want students to spend their time engaged with content or assessments and not trying to access it.

Keep in mind that Java will not work on mobile devices or Chromebooks, and Flash will not work on many mobile devices.

So...

- Use MP3, MP4, HTML,
- Avoid Java and Flash
- Make content available for offline use (save text as .TXT files or PDF; save pages as HTML files that can be opened in the browser even if offline; use the Moodle Mobile app that allows for downloading)

This page on accessibility created by Jon Fila and Caitlin Cahill for Intermediate District 287 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Text Accessibility

Selectable Text

Students should be able to highlight text with their cursor. Selectable text enables students to have the text read to them, look up definitions, translate words, and change the font (to accommodate reading disabilities). Avoid using scanned documents, word art, or other non-selectable text.

Use Your Headings

Headings are not just for style. Applying a heading format to titles and section names increases readability by creating a visual hierarchy, applying consistent style across documents, and enabling a table of contents, which is especially important for students using screen readers.

To add headings to your text, highlight the text and select the heading level from the format dropdown. Your document title should be Heading 1 (your LMS likely will do this by default), your section names should all be Heading 2, and subsections should be Heading 3 - similar to the hierarchy of an outline. Do not skip heading levels.

In Practice:

Think of a course syllabus you have designed and consider the following: Are there proper headings?; Is the Body Text properly labeled as Plain Text, Normal or Paragraph?; Are section headings meaningful?

As an example, click on Creating an Accessible Syllabus from California State Fullerton.

Based on a work from Leading Edge partners: @One, iNACOL

Go Bold for Emphasis

Neither color nor italics should be relied on for emphasizing text as these cannot be properly interpreted by students with color blindness or reading disabilities, respectively. Underlining should also be avoided, as this is reserved for links in digital text. There are plenty of students (and adults) who will click on an underlined item waiting for something to happen, and if it does not, they consider it broken.

Characteristics of Accessible Text

- text is selectable
- uses headings to designate titles and sections
- Uses bold for emphasizing text
- Does NOT rely on color for emphasis or other information
- Use page numbers or slide numbers if working on a slideshow

Links

Links should always be descriptively named and provided with(in) context, so that the students know what to expect when clicking on the link; this especially important for students using screen readers, which may provide a separate list of the links in a document.

Do not paste a link directly onto a page or name it "click here". Instead, use descriptive text (e.g. the name of the webpage it leads to), and when possible, embed the link within context or along with instructions. For example:

Read Chapter 1 of Frankenstein and then complete the quiz.

Characteristics of Accessible Links

- Link text is descriptive
- Links are provided with context / instructions
- Do NOT name links "click here"
- Do NOT paste full URLs onto pages (it's ugly. If you need to include it for a printed resource and the URL is long, customize it with a URL shortener like bitly.com )

Updating Inaccessible Text

There are many cases where some think it's just faster or easier to take a screenshot of a page and then upload that.  In this example, a screenshot of text was uploaded to a page. That is not something that a screen reader can identify, nor is the text selectable. Here's how it was fixed.

Keep in mind that OCR is not perfect, no matter which tool you use, you will likely need to proofread and edit before publishing your page. This is an example of where it would have been better to do upfront than later when it was needed. That text existed somewhere, so why not just copy/paste?

District 287 has developed a Style Guide for creating content that will be mentioned again later, but it is a good reference for all of the items listed above and other issues that are addressed in this module.

Google Docs is very hard or impossible to access, tactual diagrams would need to be described or brailled, and some content, like math, would need to be in braille. But if the materials I dealt with were presented following these guidelines, 90 percent of my problems would be solved, and it would be heavenly. I struggle with tagged PDF files because a) they have to be created well, and I don't know if you can control the order of the recognition, and b) you can't write on them, so a student would still need to access a text copy if they were going to fill them out electronically. But you can save the text in a tagged PDF. Jaws [screen reading program] works better with MS word for tasks like reading tables. BUT, if you have high quality text, you can change that Rich-Text File (RTF) into a doc file quite easily. The problems would be minor compared to what I am dealing with now.

-Karen Berger (BVI Specialist ISD 287)

This work on Text Accessibility by Caitlin Cahill and Jon Fila is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Using Tables Effectively

If you're not a screen reader user, let's pretend that you are for just a moment. You're going to a web site to find out where the biology 205 class is going to be held. You go to a web page that has this information, and this is what you hear:

Table with 10 columns and 7 rows. Department Code, Class Number, Section, Max Enrollment, Current Enrollment, Room Number, Days, Start Time, End Time, Instructor, BIO, 100, 1, 15, 13, 5, Mon,Wed,Fri, 10:00, 11:00, Magde, 100, 2, 15, 7, 5, Tue,Thu, 11:00, 12:30, Indge, 205, 1, 15, 9, 6, Tue,Thu, 09:00, 10:30, Magde, 315, 1, 12, 3, 6, Mon,Wed,Fri, 13:00, 14:00, Indge, BUS, 150, 1, 15, 15, 13, Mon,Wed,Fri, 09:00, 10:00, Roberts, 210, 1, 10, 9, 13, Mon,Wed,Fri, 08:00, 09:00, Rasid.

After listening to this information, do you have any idea where biology 205 is supposed to be held? Probably not. When you listen to tables straight through, without going into table reading mode in a screen reader, this type of information can be quite confusing. Even when you do go into table reading mode, it can still be confusing if the table is not marked up properly.

© WebAIM Used with permission http://webaim.org

Using tables is a common way for teachers to design their content without having to learn any complicated HTML or CSS coding for styling their pages. They're easy to manipulate and move content around. The problem is how a screen reader might interact with them.

Continue reading this table accessibility introduction to see how a screen reader breaks down the text in a table for the listener. There are tips for different types of tables and how they might be displayed. Whenever possible, try to avoid using tables for design purposes. Keep it simple.

The following video demonstrates how to update an existing table to make the column headings accessible.

Check out Web Accessibility in Mind for a deeper dive into accessibility issues in tables and how to fix them. Column Headers aren't the only thing that you need for table accessibility, sometimes the headers are defined in rows, sometimes table design is necessary for conveying information. Reviewing the information at WebAIM will show you what is and isn't appropriate.

This work on Table Accessibility by Jon Fila at Intermediate District 287 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Through Another Set of Eyes

Imagine being in class, district uses Google Apps, Schoology and iPads, teachers had PD and are ready to support you. Resources are posted as PDFs with directions in each file. You are to load them to Notability, mark them up and submit. Now, imagine that you are blind.

These practices are common, districts moved to less accessible LMSs, or free platforms like Google Classroom, teachers follow the guidance of their district Tech Integrationists who know about cool tools and apps. Many of these suggestions and products offer no accessibility features to students who need to use assistive devices.

Millions of individuals in the United States are blind or visually impaired. Nearly 500,000 of these individuals are school age (5-18). The following video provides a perspective on daily life with a disability. Consider your current teaching materials as they relate to accessibility. As you view, think about the content as it relates to your current role and the assignments you ask students to complete.

This short video shows a student trying to use a Learning Management System (LMS) through the use of a screen reader.

This is a major reason why we, at Intermediate District 287, use Moodle. We can customize the LMS to reduce the number of steps it takes to get to content. Many vendors claim to have an accessible tool, but as you can see from the video above, it is functionally broken and inaccessible. We are always open to feedback to how we can improve our tool. If you are in a district supporting learners with another LMS there are a few suggestions:

- Teachers can put their unit content into folders which cuts down on the number of links on the main course page;
- Move the current folder to the top of the course for faster access to the content currently needed;
- Teachers should paste content into the HTML editor instead of using files;
- Use Alt Text only for images conveying information, the rest should receive null tags.
- Hide/Remove documents that are no longer needed
- Naming conventions for folders and files that are used (tag with dates or numbers)
- Consistency (LMS, file structure. If a student is taking 6-7 courses in a day and each teacher has a different organization style then students have to learn that many ways to navigate. Let's try to keep it to one.)
- Context to links and resources so someone knows what they are supposed to do when they get to a page. Even if your LMS course is just for supplemental resources. Do students have to figure out teacher intent to know what to do with resources? It cannot just be a list of items.
- Take excerpts of articles instead of pointing students to the primary source if the primary source is not necessary (research/journal articles)
(ex. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1456409/ [Actual link posted in a 7th grade Science course with no additional context in the LMS, how many students will actually read this? Is it required? Be realistic.)
- Make file names more descriptive
- Do webquests take more time to access materials than engaging with the materials?
(ex. http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/immigration/tour/stop7.htm)
- Get PD on accessibility training
- Plan ahead. Even if something is posted for support staff a week in advance, there are multiple courses and the workload for different types of documents is different (do they need cleanup? Braille? Reformating? Alt tags? Headers?) Some items require more planning and lead time.
- Push your IT Department, Curriculum Directors and Tech Integration Specialists to perform accessibility reviews when selecting tools that don't just involve asking the vendor if their tool is accessible. Test them. Ask for updates to make tools accessible. Find out others who use the tools and leverage that against the vendors. There is power in numbers.

Is this just about the LMS or Digital Curriculum in general?

Karen Berger a BVI specialist from Intermediate District 287 has this to say:

For my students, it makes no sense that I work to increase access to the LMS because they can't access most of the materials on there. But then I talk to her case manager, and she tells me that lots other special ed kids she works with (who have perfectly normal vision) struggle with the organization of the LMS. Every teacher has a different type of organizational system for their materials.

So maybe we can't tell the Schoology Corp to rewrite Schoology to help, but I know that if classroom teachers got together and developed a consistent organizational plan as to how to organize their curriculum files, that would help a lot of kids.

Kids with organizational difficulties struggle with a poorly designed website. I believe that there is an additional "cognitive load and effort" which needs to be expended to do what used to be simple paper and pencil tasks. This will be harder for lots of kids. Kids with reading disabilities may need to use text that can be read with a text reader; most of the materials I see posted would not be accessible. Kids with physical challenges might find it hard to use text boxes: I believe text boxes are generally harder for all to use. There are Physically or Otherwise Health Impaired (POHI) kids who can see the LMS perfectly fine, but they might use special input devices which require special training. I struggle with the teacher made videos, and I am also aware that DHH kids also have special needs regarding the videos.

This is another example of why good design, in general, is good for all student. As stated elsewhere in this module, we want students to spend time on their learning materials, not trying to access them.

This page on LMS Navigation by Jon Fila at Intermediate District 287 is licensed CC-BY-NC-SA. Based on a work from Leading Edge partners: @One, iNACOL

Images and Videos

Any time you add an image to your content, you should also include alt text. The alt text is displayed when an image cannot be downloaded due to limited bandwidth and is read to students with visual impairments using screen readers. The alt text should be descriptive, but only include the relevant information a student needs to know.

Charts and other visual data should not rely solely on color to convey information, using text labels and visual patterns to differentiate data points.

Alternative Text for Images or Non-text Elements

Images are an important part of instructional content. Screen reader programs can identify the presence of an image but they cannot tell the student anything about the image unless extra content is provided. Therefore, all images must have an "alt" attribute.

If the "alt" attribute in an image tag is left out, screen readers and other user agents that read web pages aloud will typically read the "src" (source) attribute of the image, which is normally just a path to the image. This superfluous information will be confusing to students. If the image is decorative and does not convey information it still requires an alt tag (called a null tag), in the HTML it would read as alt="" (this information goes inside the image embed, some systems, like Moodle^1 allow that to be set by clicking the option that the image does not require a description. Google Docs^2 also allows for alt text on images (Format-->alt text).
^1 ^2

Video and Other Multimedia

All videos and other multimedia (e.g. an interactive activity), should include captions or a transcript. Captions can easily be added to videos by using YouTube. Videos uploaded to YouTube are automatically transcribed; automatic captions can be edited by the owner of the video.  (In fact, don't rely on auto-captioning, there are likely errors you'll need to fix, but it's a good headstart and provides an option for your students if nothing else is available.) Captions help both students with hearing impairments and students with learning disabilities. Captions also enable students to watch videos without audio when necessary.

Videos should be stored online using YouTube or Google Drive (which also allows for caption file uploads), to ensure the video will play on all devices. These services automatically convert and resize videos depending on the user's device and network capabilities.

Characteristics of Accessible Videos

- Include captions or a transcript if captions cannot be uploaded.
- Hosted online using YouTube or Google Drive
In Practice:
All video must have time-synchronized captioning that is either enabled by default or easily turned on. It should have good background-foreground contrast and be properly "chunked" for easy reading. The video below provides information about captioning in YouTube.
YouTube offers a number of captioning options. You can transcribe the videos yourself and edit timestamps; you can let YouTube transcribe your video automatically and then you can fix up any errors that occur and you can upload (or allow others to upload) files that will caption your videos. Additionally, other providers offer a variety of tools to help individuals caption YouTube or other videos. For instance, Rev.com will caption your videos for $1 per minute and send you back the caption file within the next day. That can be well worth the money for the time it will save you.
It may also be that your district has the staff who know how to edit SRT or TXT files that can be uploaded as captions. If you are in Intermediate District 287 you can reach out to the Teaching & Learning Department to discuss the best options.
Evaluating Resources
The education market moves quickly and evaluating tools and resources can be a challenging task. The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative provides a great variety of resources including a W3C Cheat Sheet that provides a quick guide to accessibility.
This page by Jon Fila and Caitlin Cahill at Intermediate District 287 is licensed CC-BY-NC-SA. Based on a work from Leading Edge partners: @One, iNACOL

Special Considerations for Math & Science

Accessible Equations

Text accessibility gets a bit trickier when there are symbols and complex characters involved. While there are many tools for creating equations, these equations are often saved as images not text, making them inaccessible. Work with your Blind and Visually Impaired (BVI) Specialists to determine how best to convey Math concepts to individual students.

Both Moodle and Google Drive have an equation editor that creates accessible equations. Microsoft Office documents and PDFs do NOT create accessible equations.

Image Captions

Math and science images also tend to require more in-depth captions and alt text, since they are usually more than just illustrative and convey data, processes, and other pertinent content. If you teach or support students in Math or Science you should view examples of effective captions from the National Center for Accessible Media.

This work on Updating Existing Content by Jon Fila is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Updating existing content

Here are some typical request a support person for a student with disabilities deals with on a daily basis:

1. Handwritten math notes: The only thing you can do is to physically retype them into Scientific notebook, to retain the mathematics formatting. Then you can print for all students or send to be brailled.
2. A Microsoft Word file that says it is a doc file, but it is really a picture of text. I saved it as a PDF file so I could recognize it with Omni Page, etc. Teachers give these kinds of files to kids who use screen readers and wonder why the kids can't read them.
3. A teacher put up a link to a specific book and what popped up was a google book resource. So all you can do is A) Go find the physical book in the library or maybe order it (takes time) or B) physically retype the print (Very time consuming but quicker than a, but there are copyright laws to consider so the most legal thing would be to put it in braille.)

You likely have existing content to use and update. Watch the video for what is a typical page and some of the items that require attention.

You will soon have an opportunity to view actual lessons that have been assigned to students and you can decide what you would do to update those pages.

This work on Updating Existing Content by Jon Fila is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Moving Forward

Next Steps

Use the 287 Course Authoring Style Guide as a quick referral guide before creating content or updating existing content.

As you run across documents, view them through the lens of accessibility. What needs updating? Who can help you? What questions do you have? Find your local experts and reach out for help.

If you still have questions that aren't addressed in this module please reach out to your site facilitator so that the answers can be included in future updates.

- Use online content - Google docs and Moodle pages - as much as possible.
- Embed and caption videos using YouTube
- Avoid PDFs and proprietary formats like Microsoft Office Word and PowerPoint
- Do NOT scan documents, at least not without using OCR and reviewing/editing.

Now You Try

Now you are about to see part of this module that is inaccessible by design. Your task is to determine, based on all you've learned so far, what you would to to fix this actual content assigned by teachers.

Example 1: Genetics Lesson

Example 2: Sharecropping Activity

Example 3: Articles of Confederation

Example 4: Voting Rights

Resources
- Accessibility Checklists from Health & Human Services
- WebAIM
- W3.org and W3.org Cheat Sheet

Tools

- JAWS is a computer screen reader program for Microsoft Windows that allows blind and visually impaired users to read the screen either with a text-to-speech output or by a refreshable Braille display. (This is a vendor product your district will provide if necessary.
- NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) is a free, open-source, portable screen reader for Microsoft Windows. Use this for your own testing as it doesn't require a fee/license.
- SpeakIt extension for Chrome: Converts text to speech (doesn't work on everything.) This one is beneficial because of how many districts are using Chromebooks.
- OCR Recognition (if you have the paper, see if your printer has this feature built in because the free ones have limitations on file size and how much you can do at once): Free-OCR; Online-OCR; Convert io (some Google Drive integration; Google Docs has limited OCR capabilities and will do up to two pages or images on a doc.
- Browse some Chrome Accessibility extensions.
- If you are creating/revising a lot of content you might want to use a Web Developer extention so that you can choose to view things like headers and alt text. It reveals all that stuff that sits behind what you are looking at so you can decide if content is accessible.

This work on Accessible Content by Jon Fila is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.