Make online learning accessible

 

To communicate our content in an accessible way means to comply with legislation, but also to enhance learning for every student. 

To support you in the creation of accessible content, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 are very useful. They cover a wide range of recommendations. As estated in their page they also develop support materials to help understand and implement web accessibility and resources, through international collaboration.

In addition to this international forum for collaboration, there are some tools that will help you assess the accessibility of the content you produce. If you know of any others that you find useful, please share in your comments.

Accessibility Bookmarkletts by the University of Illinois. It provides visualizations of web page accessibility features such as headings, landmarks, images, links, and form controls.

Accessibility Color Wheel by Giacomo Mazzocato. It helps in the choice of a color pair (text/background) to use in a web page.

Acrobat XI Pro by Adobe includes accessibility-checking tools which can identify many accessibility issues in PDF documents, and provides ways to address the identified issues.

Contrast Checker by Jorge Rumoroso is an application that checks for compliance with the contrast levels, brightness and shine in the color combination of foreground and background of textual content. This is based on the requirements of WCAG 1 and WCAG 2.

 

Functional Accessibility Evaluator 2.0 by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign evaluates websites for WCAG 2.0 Level A and AA requirements. It also provides a summary and detailed reporting on the results of the evaluations. The report URLs can be easily shared.

 

Blackboard Ally is a WCAG 2.0 AA compliant tool. It provides guidance to eTeachers about how to improve the quality of their content for everyone, and to provide students of all abilities with immediate access to content in formats that may be more suited to their specific needs.