About Accessibility

What is Accessibility?

When documents, media, web pages, and software is considered accessible that means that a person can use more than one sense or interaction to interact with the content. For example if a person using a computer cannot use a mouse they would need to be able to use the keyboard or another selection method to interact with a piece of software. Another example that you would commonly see when you are watching TV is the CC icon or announcement that the program is closed captioned. That allows a person who is deaf or hard of hearing to be able to get the same content out of a television program as anyone else. Captioning takes an audio medium and makes it visual. How something is made accessible depends on the format that you are trying to convey a message with.

Accessibility is usually not difficult. Most documents we create are accessible when we type them into Word. It usually only takes simple steps to create a fully accessible document if it is done when the file is being created. When creating documents you would do things like adding descriptions to images, adding headings to sections in long documents, and making the text available instead of just an image with text in it.

Why Should we be Concerned About Accessibility?

As educators we want to reach as many people as we can with our message and often use methods to reach someone at their level. Why would this not include people that their only barrier to learning is the format we use to present the lesson? People with disabilities want to participate in everything their peers have access to. When we make things accessible we are not giving them some type of advantage or resource that no one else isn¡¯t already given. We are just making even the playing field.

There are accessibility features available for everything. When you walk up to most buildings the entrance will either be at ground level or have a ramp. That not only helps people with motor impairments but also helps people making deliveries and people with strollers. This features seems obvious and simple now but before 1990 this was not a required feature in construction. Just look at the entrance to Main Classroom from Euclid Avenue. Older buildings were constructed without considering these accessibility features. Now when we go back and retroactively make them accessible it is more expensive and takes more time.

Electronic accessibility is not a new concept. Software companies and web based companies have been creating accessible content for decades. When the federal government required all vendors to produce accessible software and content to be eligible to receive contracts that was the first significant push toward getting accessibility into the mainstream. When big purchasers mandate an option be available it helps everyone.

Something similar is happening now in Higher education across the country. Because students and the public are advocating for their rights to access the content we produce, universities need to meet that challenge. If we join with other universities and require that our vendors make their products accessible it will make their product available for everyone. Most of our vendors are already doing this we just need to nudge the ones that are not. They will because they still want our money.

Accessible software includes many features that we all find makes it easier to use. Most keyboard shortcuts were created as accessibility features. Have you ever held the Control key and Pressed ¡°S¡± to save a document or pressed ¡°P¡± to print. That can be faster when typing a document than moving your hands away from the keyboard to use the mouse. When documents contain text markup for words instead of being an image of the print document operating systems and the crawlers used by search engines online can better index the files and it enables you to search for terms across a large number of files or inside of large documents. That is just the beginning. Accessibility features benefit everyone in many more ways.

How do we Check for Accessibility?

Checking for Accessibility is not usually a difficult process. For documents and media it is usually simple.

• Can the text in the document be selected by character or word?
• Is the selectable text accurate and matches what is visible in the document?
• ? Can the text in the document be enlarged without compromising the quality of the text?
• Is there a text description for graphical information?
• Is there a caption available for videos or a transcript for audio files?

Evaluating software and web based programs is a little more challenging but mostly involves the same questions. With applications you just need to add the additional step of checking to see if the interactions with the software can be accessed by multiple modalities.

For doing many of the evaluations there are software plugins or wizards built within programs that will help with accessibility checks. Many companies that sell software to the public sector have documents available called Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPAT). These documents assist with the evaluation of the product.