Text Accessibility
Selectable Text
Students should be able to highlight text with their cursor. Selectable text enables students to have the text read to them, look up definitions, translate words, and change the font (to accommodate reading disabilities). Avoid using scanned documents, word art, or other non-selectable text.
Use Your Headings
Headings are not just for style. Applying a heading format to titles and section names increases readability by creating a visual hierarchy, applying consistent style across documents, and enabling a table of contents, which is especially important for students using screen readers.
To add headings to your text, highlight the text and select the heading level from the format dropdown. Your document title should be Heading 1 (your LMS likely will do this by default), your section names should all be Heading 2, and subsections should be Heading 3 - similar to the hierarchy of an outline. Do not skip heading levels.
In Practice:Think of a course syllabus you have designed and consider the following: Are there proper headings?; Is the Body Text properly labeled as Plain Text, Normal or Paragraph?; Are section headings meaningful?
As an example, click on Creating an Accessible Syllabus from California State Fullerton.
Based on a work from Leading Edge partners: @One, iNACOL
Go Bold for Emphasis
Neither color nor italics should be relied on for emphasizing text as these cannot be properly interpreted by students with color blindness or reading disabilities, respectively. Underlining should also be avoided, as this is reserved for links in digital text. There are plenty of students (and adults) who will click on an underlined item waiting for something to happen, and if it does not, they consider it broken.
Characteristics of Accessible Text
- text is selectable
- uses headings to designate titles and sections
- Uses bold for emphasizing text
- Does NOT rely on color for emphasis or other information
- Use page numbers or slide numbers if working on a slideshow
Links
Links should always be descriptively name and provided with(in) context, so that the students know what to expect when clicking on the link; this especially important for students using screen readers, which may provide a separate list of the links in a document.
Do not paste a link directly onto a page or name it "click here". Instead, use descriptive text (e.g. the name of the webpage it leads to), and when possible, embed the link within context or along with instructions. For example:
Read Chapter 1 of Frankenstein and then complete the quiz.
Characteristics of Accessible Links
- Link text is descriptive
- Links are provided with context / instructions
- Do NOT name links "click here"
- Do NOT paste full URLs onto pages (it's ugly. If you need to include it for a printed resource and the URL is long, customize it with a URL shortener like bitly.com)
Updating Inaccessible Text
There are many cases where some think it's just faster or easier to take a screenshot of a page and then upload that. In this example, a screenshot of text was uploaded to a page. That is not something that a screen reader can identify, nor is the text selectable. Here's how it was fixed.
Keep in mind that OCR is not perfect, no matter which tool you use, you will likely need to proofread and edit before publishing your page. This is an example of where it would have been better to do upfront than later when it was needed. That text existed somewhere, so why not just copy/paste?
District 287 has developed a Style Guide for creating content that will be mentioned again later, but it is a good reference for all of the items listed above and other issues that are addressed in this module.
Google Docs is very hard or impossible to access, tactual diagrams would need to be described or brailled, and some content, like math, would need to be in braille. But if the materials I dealt with were presented following these guidelines, 90 percent of my problems would be solved, and it would be heavenly. I struggle with tagged PDF files because a) they have to be created well, and I don't know if you can control the order of the recognition, and b) you can't write on them, so a student would still need to access a text copy if they were going to fill them out electronically. But you can save the text in a tagged PDF. Jaws [screen reading program] works better with MS word for tasks like reading tables. BUT, if you have high quality text, you can change that Rich-Text File (RTF) into a doc file quite easily. The problems would be minor compared to what I am dealing with now.-Karen Berger (BVI Specialist ISD 287)
This work on Text Accessibility by Caitlin Cahill and Jon Fila is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.