Accessibility and Usability Guidelines

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a law that bans discrimination against people with disabilities. The ADA has several sections including 504 and 508 that directly impact higher education and online courses.  The ADA standards address access for people with physical and mental disabilities. 

What does accessible mean?  The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights defines accessible this way:

"Accessible means a person with a disability is afforded the opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as a person without a disability in an equally effective and equally integrated manner, with substantially equivalent ease of use. The person with a disability must be able to obtain the information as fully, equally, and independently as a person without a disability.” https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/investigations/11116002-b.html Links to an external site.

As you create your online course, be aware that all content should be fully accessible for all students.  Files and documents should be formatted to meet accessibility guidelines.  Multimedia or videos should include a transcript or closed captioning.  Course pages should be designed using a clear, consistent layout.  If you use external webpages or other resources, it is your responsibility to ensure that they meet accessibility requirements.

Best Practices

Accessible courses benefit all students. For example, closed-captioned videos help students whose first language is not English and some students may not choose to disclose a disability. Using heading styles to structure a Canvas page or document ensures that they identify topics and sub-topics clearly so sighted students can comprehend the text more efficiently and that they are navigable by screen readers. If you build accessibility into your course from the beginning, you may not need to modify your course in the event of a federally-mandated accommodation request.       

Ways to Make Your Course Accessible

• Include a disability statement in your syllabus that communicates students who are seeking accommodations need to work with Disability Resources for Students. Be sure to provide accurate contact information for DRS. DRS has provided an example syllabus statement on their website (Links to an external site.)

• Consider the accessibility of an electronic textbook before selection. Is it available in multiple formats? Is there an electronic version already available? Please note, electronic does not inherently mean accessible. A screen reader user and keyboard user should be able to navigate an eBook.

• Apply consistent organizational structure to your course pages when creating content.

  • Use Heading, Sub-heading and Paragraph Styles (Links to an external site.) in the rich content editor.

  • Use vertical lists (like this one, rather than lists within a sentence) where applicable for easier comprehension and navigation, such as assignments or readings.  Use bulleted or numbered lists by using Word's formatting tools (not by typing the numbers or dashes yourself). Using the list formatting tool allows assistive technology to determine the length of the list and the reader can understand how the content is organized and how many items are on the list.

• Ensure text in documents can text be highlighted, copied and pasted.

  • Image-based PDF files may need to be converted. UW Disability Resource Services (Links to an external site.) can assist with conversion for accommodation requests. Faculty, students and staff can use the free online conversion tool to turn one file type (image PDF) into another (text selectable PDF). tinyurl.com/uw-doc-convert (Links to an external site.).

• Images:

  • Include text descriptions (alt text) for all graphics and pictures.

  • Use alternate text tags when embedding image content (Links to an external site.) in the rich content editor.

  • Image Position: Often, when people add images to a document they select to wrap the text around the image. By wrapping text around an image, screen readers will skip over it. To ensure screen readers do not skip over an image, it needs to be in line with text, which means the image is on its own line. From there you can position the image to the left, right, or center.
  • • Right click on the image.
    • Select ‘Format Picture’.
    • Click on ‘Alt-text’ and type the meaning of the image in this context.
    • If the image is purely decorative and you want a screen reader to skip over it, make sure to go in and check to make sure the file name is not listed as default alt-text. Instead, press the space bar, then enter to create null alt text, in other words, enter a blank space.Add Alt Text to Images: There are two fields provided in MS Word to add alt text to images. Enter the information only in the Description field. Why? Because not all screen readers access the Title field, but all of them access the Description field.  Note: Enter your alt text into the description field, not the title. 

• Ensure that video files have closed captioning and audio files have a transcript.

• Review the Online Course Accessibility Checklist (Links to an external site.) for more information.

• Format Tables Appropriately: By default, assistive technology will read a table from left to right starting at the top. The relationship between the cells is not defined if it is not formatted correctly. Use MS Word's Table Tools editor to identify the different types of rows and columns.

  • Add a caption for your table - select the table and right click to access the menu. (View step by step Instructions: How to Add a Caption to a Table (Links to an external site.) (Links to an external site.))
  • Highlight the row that includes the category titles.
  • With the table selected, go to the Table Design tab to check the Header Row box and if the first row also contains headers, then check the First Column box
  • Right-click the row and select Table Properties (you can also access the table properties from the Layout tab when the table is selected).
  • Click the Row tab, and check the checkbox that says “Repeat as header row at the top of each page” (unselect "Allow row to break across pages").

• Spacing/Layout: Many people will use the tab key, space bar, and blank lines or text boxes to move text around and have it display just as they'd like. However, using these tools to format a document may cause accessibility problems. Here are some things to consider:
  • Columns: If you want to make columns, format them as columns. Do not put text on one line and use the tab key to move it over (a screen reader will read it one line at a time, not as columns).
  • Extra Spaces: If there are a series of spaces in a document, someone may assume they've reached the end of a document (and it becomes a formatting nightmare if you add more text or change the font size). To avoid this, use the page break tool if you're trying to keep content on one page and use the increase and decrease indent tools to scoot text over (rather than tabbing or using multiple spaces). Extra spaces (white space) between paragraphs should be added by editing the Line Spacing Options or the Normal style in the Home ribbon.

  • Document Properties: One last, quick step is to go into the document properties (File > Properties > Summary) and fill out the title, author, subject (short description), keywords, language, and copyright status. This allows users to have a bit of information about the document without needing to open it. For someone using assistive technology, this can help limit the necessity of opening a document in order to determine if it's the one they're looking for.

Additional UW Resources for Accessibility

WORD DOCUMENTS

Reference

OCR Resolution Agreement. (nd). Retrieved from: https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/investigations/11116002-b.html