LibGuides: Accessibility for Course Materials: Creating Accessible Course Materials

Accessibility Elements

Creating Accessible Course Documents and Materials

Key Concepts - Accessible Documents

Document Metadata: Add metadata information, such as Title, Author, Language.
Alt Text: Ensure meaningful images have alternative text and
- decorative images without mean marked as “decorative” to alert the reader to lack of meaningful content
Headings: Use concise headings to delineate sections of your document. T
- Tag and order them like an outline (Heading 3, Heading 4, Heading 5, etc)
Color: Choose colors that provide adequate contrast and
- Do not rely on color alone to convey meaning or emphasis
Accessibility Checkers: Use available Accessibility Tools (Word, PDF, LMS, etc) to run an accessibility check of the document as you work.

Creating Documents for Accessibility

Organize content so it has a logical flow:
- Headings
  - Help to identify the hierarchical structure of a document
    - chapters, headings, and sub-headings, sections, sub-sections,, etc.
  - Allows students to clearly see how the main concepts are related
- Tag your document with headings
  - headings are one of the main ways that students using a screen reader navigate through a chapter
Generate the document from Word (File > Save as > PDF > Export) or other word processing software to create an accessible PDF
Use descriptive alt-text for images, charts, and diagrams
Be mindful of color and color contrasts
Use mindful formatting techniques

Converting Documents

Use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software
- OCR refers broadly to the process of converting scanned documents and textual materials into text that is readable, recognizable, and selectable by the computer, assistive software programs, or end users,
  - Used by students who rely on screen readers and other assistive technologies,
- OCR processing makes the scan of a document usable – transforming it from an image capture of a text to a document composed of recognized strings of text.
  - Adobe Acrobat
  - Chrome extensions

More Information on Accessible Elements

Accessible Content
Creating accessible elements benefit everyone. Maximizing accessibility allows for democratic, just, equitable, and inclusive access.
How Accessible Content Functions
Functional content is important for users of assistive technology to ensure they can consume and interact with material. Ensuring function benefits all users, allowing choice and customization when accessing material.
Accessible Structure
Well structured documents are essential to allow assistive technology to navigate documents. As well, consistently structured documents help all readers with context, organization of ideas, and clarity. Using a consistent structure help.
Accessible Appearance
Accessible appearance helps those with vision impairments, cognitive disabilities, or colour blindness. However, like many accessible design practices, following these best practices will benefit everyone.
Accessible Color
1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some kind of color vision deficiency. To create accessible content, foreground information must have sufficient color contrast against background colors. Additionally, it is essential that color is not the only means to convey or emphasize information.
Accessible Headings
Headings are essential for screen reader users to navigate long documents. Headings benefit all readers by providing context, organizing material, and emphasizing connections.
Accessible Links
Descriptive links are essential for screen reader users but also help everyone understand the purpose and destination of links.
Accessible Text Equivalents
Text equivalents are essential to accessible content. Everyone benefits from clear links, blind and visually impaired users need alternative text and/or figure captions, closed captions and transcripts are helpful to all but essential for people that are deaf or hard of hearing.
Alternative Text (Alt-Text)
Alternative text (alt text) is an image description attached to a visual element. Alt text is code that is read by screen reader software to blind and low vision readers. Alt text allows all users to understand the context, purpose and meaning of visual content by relaying critical visual information in text format.
Alt Text for Complex Images
Describing complex visual content, such as flowcharts and diagrams, can be difficult. For complex images, it may not be feasible to describe the image in 1 or 2 sentences. Additionally, alt text does not support lists and headings. Structured text is essential to make long text digestible for screenreader users. That is one of the reasons why alt text should be brief.
Closed Captions
Captions provide a text equivalent of all audio elements in a video, presented visually in time with the video. Traditionally, we think of captions as an accommodation for viewers who cannot hear the audio in a video due to hearing loss. But many other learners find captions useful as well.
Captioning and Transcription Tools
Covers: Captioning on Common Video Platforms; Finding Captioned Videos on YouTube; Social Media Captions; Creating Caption Files and Transcripts
Articles Source: Accessibility for Teaching and Learning (OER)
This guide is designed to introduce concepts of digital accessibility such as color contrast and alternative text and provide detailed instructions to use the accessibility features of software such as Word, and PowerPoint.
Creating Accessible Online Content at Western
Professional Learning Series: Applying Course Design through Quality Matters. Use the Quality Matters Rubric to confirm accessibility and usability of course content for all learners. This video reviews Standard 8 of the rubric and the features of ALLY in Blackboard.

Testing for Accessibility

Good accessibility does not happen by accident. It is crucial to consider accessibility in the early stages of developing or redesigning documents and course materials so that you can incorporate accessibility evaluations early and throughout the process. The earlier you can identify accessibility problems, the easier and less costly it is to address them.

Testing for Accessibility
Lists testing tools and shares ways to test websites and applications for accessibility, as well as give you a sense of what it is like to navigate tools and content with assistive technology
Keyboard Testing
For some people with disabilities, they exclusively use their keyboard and don’t use a mouse at all. Therefore, all page and document features need to be keyboard accessible, meaning someone should not need to use a mouse to navigate or interact with the page content.
Screen Reader Testing
NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) is a free screen reader for Windows. NVDA is popular for testing web pages and documents.
Accessibility Insights for Windows
There is an additional accessibility checking tool available for Windows applications called Microsoft Accessibility Insights. This tool can inspect Windows applications using a standard called User Interface Automation (UIA), which is the accessibility framework for Microsoft Windows. UIA provides access to user interface (UI) elements which is what enables assistive technology (AT) products like screen readers to provide information about the UI to users.
Accessibility Checker - Adobe Acrobat
Learn how to use Adobe Acrobat to make PDFs meet the common accessibility standards, such as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 and PDF/UA (Universal Access, or ISO 14289).
Accessibility Checker - Microsoft Office 365
Use Accessibility Checker in Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel to check your email messages, documents, slides, and spreadsheets for accessibility issues while you work. This way you can make sure your Microsoft 365 content is easy for people with disabilities to read and edit.
Checklist for Accessibility