Basics of Accessibility

There are many things to consider when planning for accessibility, but The Ohio State University’s Minimum Digital Accessibility Standards Sketch out the expectations for accessibility in our online courses. The following information is meant to be a reference for you to plan your online course with accessibility in mind. For more assistance with accessibility considerations, you can rely on your Instructional Designer to help you find solutions and be sure all your students can fully participate in your course.

For this section, you will watch the video below and then read through some of the best practices around accessibility. Finally, I will leave you with resources to go beyond compliance and deepen your understanding of what it is to create inclusive learning environments.

Accessibility: An Interview with Heidi K. Hartley (19:08)

Considerations for Functional Accessibility

Condensed from the Minimum Digital Accessibility Standards

To be functionally accessible, digital information and services must consider use by people who may:

  • have a severe or moderate visual impairment
  • be colorblind
  • be deaf or hard of hearing
  • have motor disabilities
  • have cognitive disabilities

Severe Visual Impairments

Users with severe visual impairments typically use screen readers, programs that render text and image content as speech or braille output to assist with the navigation of web pages and other programs. Screen readers identify not only text but also alternate text added to provide a description for images. They facilitate full interaction with web page content and allow users to skip between chunks of content by link, heading, form element, and content area, among other means. Invalid or lax coding practices, minimal logical structure and semantics, and inappropriate or missing textual descriptions for images or links make navigation and understanding of web content difficult or impossible for screen reader-reliant users. Some uses of dynamic content or plug-ins can be inaccessible to screen readers as well.

Moderate Visual Impairments

Users with moderate to severe visual impairments (“low vision”) typically enlarge their on-screen fonts, either by using the browser’s zoom or text scaling facilities or by using screen magnification software. These users may also set their operating system to a “high-contrast” mode or use custom style sheets to increase the contrast between foreground text and background colors.

Color Blindness

Users with color blindness have problems distinguishing between certain colors. Digital information and services must not use color as the sole means of conveying information to ensure that users who cannot perceive color differences are able to understand the content.

Deaf or Hard of Hearing

Users who are deaf or hard of hearing may rely on transcripts of audio content, captioned video, and alternatives to auditory cueing.

According to best practices and our Minimum Digital Accessibility Standards, all video content must have a synchronized text track (captions), providing a transcription of spoken text, speaker identification, and text equivalents of non-verbal audio (a.k.a., sound effects), as appropriate. Audio podcasts and other spoken audio must be accompanied by a full-text transcription. Web pages or applications that use audio cues also should provide a visual, preferably text-based, cue.

Motor Disabilities

Users with various motor disabilities may have difficulty using a mouse or trackpad as a pointing device, due to nerve conditions, disease, or injury. Limited motor acuity may affect response times and accuracy in selecting navigation or options within forms and other controls. Repetitive stress and other less severe motor disabilities may make over-reliance on the keyboard difficult – for example, excessive tabbing to move through controls. Users with limited upper-body mobility may use speech recognition for input or other input devices which mimic keyboard input, or they may rely solely on the keyboard for all input.

Developers should test to make sure all navigation, forms, and other control elements in web pages and application interfaces are accessible and operable via the keyboard alone, and ensure that if timed responses are necessary there is the ability to extend the time and that the functionality is easy to understand and locate in the page or application. Also try to judge the impact on usability afforded by the quantity and complexity of input required for navigation, form, or other input. The university also recommends testing the usability of web forms and applications with speech recognition software, such as Dragon Naturally Speaking or Windows Speech Recognition.

Cognitive Disability

Cognitive disability is the most broad and varied category of disability. Most users with disabilities registered through our Office of Student Life Disability Services have some form of cognitive disability. Thus, attention to usability problems that may be encountered by users with cognitive disabilities will have proportionally the greatest positive impact on consumers of digital information and services. Cognitive disabilities include conditions affecting reading and verbal comprehension, learning disabilities, attention, and distractibility disorders, conditions affecting memory and processing of large amounts of information, and problems comprehending information presented mathematically or graphically.

Minimum Digital Accessibility Standards

Condensed from the Minimum Digital Accessibility Standards

The Minimum Digital Accessibility Standards (MDAS) form the technical implementation standards of Ohio State’s Digital Accessibility Policy They are maintained by the Digital Accessibility Center under the direction of the ADA Coordinator’s Office, The goal of MDAS is to ensure that digital information and services provided by the university are functionally accessible to persons with disabilities.

According to Ohio State’s Digital Accessibility Policy, all digital information and services to be used by faculty, staff, program participants, the general public, or other university constituencies are required to be compliant with the non-discrimination provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), as amended, and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. 

To be compliant with our Digital Accessibility Policy, a person with a disability must be 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. A person with a disability must be able to obtain the information or service as fully, equally, and independently as a person without a disability.

Resources

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