Making sure your resource is accessible

As instructors, we have legal and ethical obligations to ensure our courses are fully accessible to all learning, including those with disabilities. We use digital resources in our courses because we believe they enhance learning. However, unless carefully chosen with accessibility in mind, these resources can have the opposite effect for students with disabilities, erecting daunting barriers that make learning difficult or impossible.

The University of Washington developed an IT Accessibility Checklist Links to an external site. that can help anyone creating or choosing digital resources to understand the accessibility requirements related to the features and functions of those resources.

To learn more about Accessibility watch the video below: 

Things to consider:

• Use captions for videos. This helps many students for many reasons
• Provide alt text for images
• Don’t use tables for formatting (they are for data). Tables don’t translate well with screen readers
• Use headings rather than simply making the text bold. Sighted people can scan a page for bold text, screen readers scan based on heading and styles.
• Links are read out loud by screen readers so that text should be informative (rather than the hyperlink itself)
• Don’t use color alone to convey meaning
• Make sure PDF documents are in the accessible. We will go over these in more depth later on.

Content adapted from WebAIM's Introduction to Web Accessibility Links to an external site.(copyrighted)