Unit 8 – Web Accessibility and Digital Learning

Unit Overview

This unit focuses on learning a bit about accessiblity in the context of teaching/developing your course, as well as to teach you some about how to do an accessibility review on your course.

Activities

  • What is accessibility?
  • Creating accessible web content
  • Evaluating your course

Objectives

  • Learn about accessibility in courses
  • Know of tools that are useful in assessing accessibility
  • Know about WCAG and the checklists
  • Be able to apply an accessibility check to your own course

Readings/Resources

Technical Tools (also linked below in course content)

Content and technical accessibility

Content accessibility is just that, it’s the ability for a reader/viewer to interact with and consume your content regardless of their background and individual needs. Technical accessibility is the assurance that the technical systems in which your content is delivered are accessible. In the case of online courses this is systems for content delivery such as D2L, or the technologies (computers/tablets, etc) that students use to access your content.

In most cases as an instructor your work with accessibility will focus on content, as most faculty are not building their own technologies for teaching. At MSU we have strong accessibility policies that ensure that technical systems are either accessible already, or we are working with the vendor to ensure compliance with our policies. If you choose to use a system that is not centrally provided it is up to you as the faculty member to ensure that your students are able to access the content.

Tools for Evaluating Your Course

HTML Code Sniffer

HTML Code Sniffer is the tool I use most often as it gives me a quick overview of how inaccessible a page likely is. It sits as a bookmarklet in my browser and at the click of a mouse will analyze any page I have up for Section 508 or WCAG2.0 A, AA, and AAA. The tool returns known errors, warnings and notices complete with a description of it, links to the W3C website, and a snippet of the code it’s looking at.

Tota11y

Tota11y is another bookmarklet based tool that helps to confirm things Code Sniffer has found and to identify other issues. Particularly useful are its ability to identify possible contrast issues, lay out the heading structure, and identify ARIA landmarks. It also has a feature called Screen Reader Wand that seems to be a reasonably good emulator for what a screen reader would see. Tota11y will report errors it finds as well, but lacks some of the details Code Sniffer provides.

Web Developer Tool Bar

I have long used the web developer tool bar in developing websites, but have recently found it to be very useful for helping see what a page looks like when you strip out all formatting and styles. I usually use it to turn off all styles and also hide images and background images but leave alt text on. This gives me a relatively good overview of what a page might look like on the front end to a screen reader or search engine.

Colour Contrast Analyser and WebAIM Color Contrast Checker

OK, this is two tools, but they both have uses that I find complement one another. First is the Colour Contrast Analyser from the Paciello Group and the second is WebAIM’s Color Contrast Checker. The first requires a download but is worth it for the ability to use droppers to select colors (easy to find the exact color you want). It will immediately tell you whether your colors pass at AA and AAA levels and gives the hex code for color. If my contrast is not passing, I take the hex code over to the WebAIM tool and use their lighten/darken feature to find a color that is closest to the one that is causing the failure. There are many times this has allowed us to maintain a look imagined by the designer while also ensuring the site is accessible.

These tools are certainly not a comprehensive suite, and they do require a reasonable amount of background knowledge (as do all accessibility tools) to use for proper remediation work. However, along with a few other tools they form a solid base from which to work.

Conducting an Accessibility Review

One of the best places to start with conducting an accessibility review is to use the Basic Accessibility Checklist provided by MSU. This is a starting point for making your course accessible, and is a great way to ensure that you are doing many of the things you need to do in order to make content accessible to all. The points made in this checklist are things that you’ll ideally start to include in your daily workflow so over time you won’t be needing to go back and review content, but rather you’ll be creating more accessible content from the start.