Preparing to Teach
3 Accessibility
Jennifer Smith
Why is Accessibility Important? | Accommodation | Course Site Design | PowerPoint | Accessible PDF Files | SensusAccess | Get Help! | Closed Captions | Publisher Material/ Tools | Specific Needs | References
Why is Accessibility Important?
The University of Florida is committed to providing all students with accessible websites and course content. Recent court cases and U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights investigations of higher education institutions indicate that electronic content must meet accessibility requirements. UF’s Electronic Information Accessibility Policy can be found on the Accessibility.ufl.edu website.
Accommodation
Students may request an accommodation through UF’s Disability Resource Center. However, this should be the exception rather than the rule. Students requesting accommodation are interviewed by the DRC staff. The instructor is provided with information regarding the required accommodation. Contact the DRC immediately if you have any questions.
Course Site Design
The recommendations described below make it possible for screen reader users to access material efficiently. These same practices support other assistive devices and general usability. Before we get started, it would be helpful for you to see how a screen reader works: Screen Reader Demo
Headings and Subheadings
Screen reader users have the ability to navigate through pages by skipping from heading to subheadings. This means that they don’t have to listen to the all of the page content to find what they need. But to do this, headings and subheadings need to be “tagged.” Page titles are generally <h1> and the major section headings are <h2> and then they can go down to <h4> or <h5>.
Don’t use font size or bold to create your headings. Instead, highlight the heading text and choose the heading level from the menu at the top of your Canvas content editor.
Poor Link Example:
“Donald Tapscott, in his paper ”Growing Up Digital,” http://www.ncsu.edu/meridian/jan98/feat_6/digital.html says these students…”
Listen to bad example audio from screen reader
Good Link Example:
“Donald Tapscott, in his paper ”Growing Up Digital ,” says these students…”
Avoid “Click Here”
Screen reader users can use the Tab key to skip from link to link. That means that the user won’t hear what the link is if the text describing the link is not used as the link text. What does this mean to you? Avoid using “click here,” “link” or the URL as the link.
Alternative Text
Every image in your course needs to have “Alt text.” This allows the screen reader to identify or describe the image. Avoid repeating text that may be next to the image. Avoid using phrases such as “click this image to. . .” To add Alt Text to your Canvas images, simply click on the “Embed image” icon in the content editing window (it’s a picture of a tree) and it will open a dialog box where you can type the description.
When possible, avoid using text as part of