For online instruction, following basic digital accessibility best practices will help ensure content is more accessible to students, including the following from Universal Design Cheatsheet from MSU Web & Digital Communications:
From WebAim:
Headings communicate the organization of the content on the page. Web browsers, plug-ins, and assistive technologies can use them to provide in-page navigation.
Highlight the text you want to use as a heading. Then, in Word, LibGuides, etc. there is a dropdown box to choose between normal text, heading 1, heading 2, etc. (from: Headings by the W3C)
For example:
Heading 1: Title of the Book (use only one H1 per page/document, etc. e.g. there is only one title of the book!)
Heading 2: Chapter tittle, or section title
Heading 3: sub-chapter, or sub-section, if needed
Heading 4: sub-chapter, or sub-section of the heading 3, if needed.
Heading 2: Chapter tittle, or section title
Heading 2: Chapter tittle, or section title
h1
per page that describes what that page is about. That h1
preferably starts just above the main content."There are no absolute ideals for accessibility that will provide access to all people. However, by following these guidelines, [users] are less likely to be needlessly overlooked." (Gilson & Kitchin, 2007)
Sources: solopress.com, asha.org, Gilson & Kitchin, 2007
The following is an abbreviated list from the Full Image Description Guidelines from the Diagram Center:
While a word cloud itself is usually not accessible because it’s often inserted as an image, an alt-text description listing the words in order of importance can be used as an alternative.
Provide a text alternative that conveys the top, most common words in the word cloud.
If you see two fields for both a Title and Description when you are adding alt text, use the Description field.
Why? Microsoft's intention: "The screen reader first reads the title. The person can then decide whether to hear a longer description." If there is no title, it will just read the description.
Alt Text for Scientific Graphics: Balancing between Accessibility and Giving the Answers, from the Teaching and Learning Center
These resources are from the Accessibility Handbook for Teaching and Learning by Briana Fraser and Luke McKnight, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. No changes have been made.
Some best practices for audio recordings accessibility are:
W3C outlines good recommendations for audio descriptions (linked below) as follows:
MSU provides access to TechSmith (linked below), which can be used to generate closed captions and/or add an audio description track Log in with your NetID to upload videos that you want to add captions or a description track to.
For instructions on how to add captions, and/or an audio description track in TechSmith, see the links provided below.
The following guidelines are referenced from Oregon State University page on Hardware Accessibility, and Section 508 1194.26
Unless otherwise noted the content on this LibGuide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.