Moving Forward
Next Steps
Use the 287 Course Authoring Style Guide as a quick referral guide before creating content or updating existing content.
As you run across documents, view them through the lens of accessibility. What needs updating? Who can help you? What questions do you have? Find your local experts and reach out for help.
If you still have questions that aren't addressed in this module please reach out to your site facilitator so that the answers can be included in future updates.
- Use online content - Google docs and Moodle pages - as much as possible.
- Embed and caption videos using YouTube
- Avoid PDFs and proprietary formats like Microsoft Office Word and PowerPoint
- Do NOT scan documents, at least not without using OCR and reviewing/editing.
Now You Try
Now you are about to see part of this module that is inaccessible by design. Your task is to determine, based on all you've learned so far, what you would to to fix this actual content assigned by teachers.
Example 1: Genetics Lesson
Example 2: Sharecropping Activity
Example 3: Articles of Confederation
Example 4: Voting Rights
Resources- Accessibility Checklists from Health & Human Services
- WebAIM
- W3.org and W3.org Cheat Sheet
Tools
- JAWS is a computer screen reader program for Microsoft Windows that allows blind and visually impaired users to read the screen either with a text-to-speech output or by a refreshable Braille display. (This is a vendor product your district will provide if necessary.
- NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) is a free, open-source, portable screen reader for Microsoft Windows. Use this for your own testing as it doesn't require a fee/license.
- SpeakIt extension for Chrome: Converts text to speech (doesn't work on everything.) This one is beneficial because of how many districts are using Chromebooks.
- OCR Recognition (if you have the paper, see if your printer has this feature built in because the free ones have limitations on file size and how much you can do at once): Free-OCR; Online-OCR; Convert io (some Google Drive integration; Google Docs has limited OCR capabilities and will do up to two pages or images on a doc.
- Browse some Chrome Accessibility extensions.
- If you are creating/revising a lot of content you might want to use a Web Developer extention so that you can choose to view things like headers and alt text. It reveals all that stuff that sits behind what you are looking at so you can decide if content is accessible.
This work on Accessible Content by Jon Fila is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.