5.6 Developing accessible content

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As you develop and revise content for your online course it is important to create accessible content. While you may not be able to make your course content fully accessible, the best practices listed below can help ensure your course is accessible to as many students as possible. As you go through this list, consider ways that you can incorporate accessibility best practices in your online course.

Describe your graphics

What: Any graphics (including charts and maps) that convey non-text information should include a descriptive alternative text, also called “alt text”. This should fully describe the image and it’s purpose. Limit purely decorative images, but if you include them leave the alt text blank.

Why: Consider what a course page or resource would look like if the images didn’t load. Alt text will be available to sighted students when images are missing, and screen readers will read the alt text to students with visual impairments. Alt text can help instructors make sure that the image communicates its intended purpose.

How: Alternative text is rarely a literal description of the image. Rather than providing what the image looks like, alt text should convey the content and the purpose of the image.

Example: From Introduction to Sociology Links to an external site.:

The first photo shows small, crowded small buildings located on the hillside. The second photo shows modern skyscrapers located by the water.

Figure 20.11. The slum city and the global city: the Favéla Morro do Prazères in Rio de Janeiro and
the London financial district show two sides of global urbanization
(Photos courtesy of dany13/Flickr and Peter Pearson/Flickr).

In this case, the alternative text could be: "Figure 20.11 includes two photos. The first photo shows small, crowded small buildings located on the hillside. The second photo shows modern skyscrapers located by the water."

Transcribe your media

What: Transcripts are text versions of the spoken word. Text captions are synchronized with the audio in a video presentation and are important when people need to see what’s happening in the video and get the audio information in the text at the same time.

Why: A transcript provides students with equivalent information to the audio and video content, which will help them learn if they were not able to hear the audio, see the video portion, or if they have heard, seeing or understanding the spoken word, dialect, or language.

How: Transcripts provide speakers’ names, all speech content, and descriptions of relevant non-speech audio. You can order machine captioning or automatic speech recognition (ASR) through Kaltura or upload your own transcripts. Transcripts can also be used by all students for additional study and review. More information about this functionality in Kaltura is available in  Module 9: Ordering, Editing and Viewing Captions of the Kaltura 101 course.

Example: In the Learning Commons site’s Thinking Critically Toolkit, the video provides a caption as well as a transcript file [pdf].

Describe your hyperlinks

What: Links should be embedded in meaningful text. Ensure that linked text describes a topic or purpose.

Why: If links are embedded in clear, concise, and meaningful text, all students can quickly scan pages to find the links they are looking for. If links are broken, students can easily search and find them.

How: Instead of linking generic text such as “click here” or “go-to”, use text where the purpose of the link can be determined.

Example: “Click here for more information” has a less clear link than “An OER Accessibility Toolkit is available online.”

Make your text readable

What: Adjust your font size and text contrast to optimize viewing. Font size is the size of text visible on the screen, and colour contrast refers to the brightness of a colour against the darkness of the colour it appears on top of (e.g., text against the background of a page or document).

Why: When documents or web pages have text that is too small or colours that do not provide enough contrast between foreground and background elements, students will have difficulty reading the content. Students who are colour blind might miss important information if it is given through colour alone (e.g., correct answers are in green).

How: For most documents, the text should be around 12 points and be able to be zoomed to 200%. Never use colour alone to provide important information (or show emphasis) and ensure high colour contrast. For example, if you have white text on a light-coloured background, the contrast is probably insufficient for many students.

Structure your page

What: Organized content allows students to clearly see how concepts are related. Headings help to identify the hierarchical structure of a document (e.g., sections, subsections).

Why: Headings are one of the main ways that students using a screen reader navigate through a digital resource. Headings provide a visual cue that helps sighted readers quickly navigate through sections of a document. Similarly, headings create logical divisions in the content.

How: Use heading levels in sequential order to represent the structure of a page rather than making the text appear like a heading by applying visual elements such as bold text and larger font size. Headings can be easily created in Canvas and many word processing programs.

Example: If you look at the table of contents of the accessibility toolkit, the heading makes it easier to scan and navigate what each section of the toolkit is about.

Tools that can help you to make your course accessible

Below are tools that can help you improve the accessibility of the course or flag course components that may not be accessible. Even if they indicate that the course is very accessible, it may not necessarily mean that the course is fully accessible to everyone.

For more information on accessibility guidelines, see UBC Platform Specific Accessibility Guidelines from the OER Accessibility Toolkit.

 

This section is adapted from UBC Accessibility Handout (CC BY 4.0) and BC Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit 2nd edition Links to an external site. by Amanda Coolidge, Sue Doner, and Tara Robertson (CC by 4.0).