Accessibility
Overview
The National Center on Accessible Educations Materials shares that “Accessibility is shaped by what we do, our interactions with the environment, and our personal preference.” North Dakota State University is committed to ensuring that our campus is inclusive and accessible to all students, faculty, staff, and community.
Accessibility is a fundamental part of the Universal Design for Learning framework which focuses on removing learning barriers, improves, and optimizes teaching and learning for all people. Accessibility in higher education ensures that all persons, including those with significant disabilities, are provided equitable access to digital content and opportunities to receive effective educational services, with the needed support services.
Getting Started
- This article introduces some basic considerations to help in creating accessible digital content. Additional resources include:
- Anthology Ally – Blackboard tool used to score digital course content for accessibility, includes instructions for fixing the issues, and Alternative format downloads for students.
- Assistive Technology – technology tool resources.
- Enroll in the Online Self-paced Certificate Course – Universal Design for Learning and Digital Accessibility
Best Practices
- Creating accessible digital content ensures it is available and usable by all users, regardless of their abilities or disabilities. To achieve this think about accessibility before, during, and ending your creation of all digital content. Review and fix accessibility issues before sharing the content with others.
- Begin by providing headings in documents, alternative text for images, descriptive links for URLs, formatting tables, including captions for videos, providing transcripts for audio, reviewing color contrast and much more.
Learn More/How To's
The following checklist will help to review whether your digital content meets accessibility standards. The links also provide descriptions of why the items are important and how to make necessary changes. Accessibility Checklist to follow when checking digital content.
- Accessibility Checkers - All documents and presentations (example:Word, Excel,PowerPoints and PDFs)have been tested with an accessibility checker.
- Alternative Text - a written description of an image, graph, chart, or other visual element on a web page or a digital document, embedded for screen readers.
- Accessible Applets, Scripts, Extensions and Plugins - Links are provided to all applets, scripts and plugins needed to launch various technologies.
- Audio Description – text describing what is being display in a video for persons with a visual impairment.
- Color Contract – the contrasting colors of brightness with backgrounds, images, and text. Text and graphics are meaningful when viewed without color.
- Descriptive hyperlinks - text describing the hyperlink to provide context to understand the purpose of the link. Link is embedded in the text.
- External Tools & Resources - accessibility of all tools, content, materials and websites, including those from external sources, needs to be confirmed to meet accessibility standards.
- Headings - are usedto organize content and make it easy to navigate.
- Long Description – a text version of information displayed in a complex image, chart, or graphic. This is similar to alt text, but includes more detail.
- PDF Tags – tagging PDF documents creates a structure which allows assistive technologies to read through the document in a logical and understandable order.
- Permalinks – web addresses that point to a speciic resource online and are designed to remain unchanged for years.
- Reading Order – the order in which a screen reader will read out the text and alt text included.
- Tables - are ways to help organize information, but also need to read easily by a screen reader.
- Video & Audio-only Transcripts – video and audio-only transcripts are text version of the audio content.
- Video Captions – videos should all have the option to display captions (subtitles) synchronized with the audio.
FAQs
- Coming Soon!
Use Cases
- Designing and developing digital course content
- Creating departmental documents and resources
- Ensuring closed captioning is available and text transcripts for virtual meeting attendees
Universal Design/Accessibility
- Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and digital accessibility both seek to increase access to educational digital content and reduce barriers for students and everyone. Using UDL guidelines and introducing inclusive teaching strategies in your courses sends a welcoming message that all are included.
- CAST – Universal Design for Leaning resources
- UDL Guidelines – Guidelines 3.0 tool to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people