ada compliance – best practices 2013
DESCRIPTION
TRANSCRIPT
ADA COMPLIANCE – BEST PRACTICES
ACCESSIBILITY MEANS… Students with disabilities can use the Web. People with disabilities can perceive,
understand, navigate, interact, and contribute to the Web.
In short: we have the responsibility to provide resources that are accessible to everyone. Electronic resources need to follow principles of universal design, meaning that the creation of websites, online materials, and online courses have to be developed with the objective of meeting the needs of everyone.
OUR BEST RECOMMENDATIONS
PRACTICE #1 – INSTITUTIONAL POLICY
Develop an institutional policy for minimum accessibility requirements for online courses.
An ADA statement is in the institutional syllabus
PRACTICE #2 – RETRO FITTING
Determine who is responsible for each step of initial development process and retro-fitting process in online courses.
PRACTICE #3 – INSTRUCTOR DRIVEN
Collaborate with disability services staff
Communication is KEY! Keep the future in mind as you design
PRACTICE # 4 – WRITE FOR THE WEB
Use short sentences Remember to check spelling Write out acronyms (avoid special symbols) Use numbers rather than bullets Keep tables simple with headings Colored, highlighted, italicized or bolded
font to denote importance of text is avoided. Keep text size in mind!
PRACTICE #5 - ALT TAGS
Graphics and pictures have alt tags so that screen readers can read them, also followed with descriptive text for relevant images.
PRACTICE #6 - DESCRIPTIVE LINKS
All links are descriptive, this is because often users of screen readers will navigate the links in the JAWS reader indexing tool
PRACTICE #7 – CONTENT DESIGN Design for the Web
Use consistent clear headings Use san serif fonts (no specialty or script
fonts) Use high contrast colors
Use Word and PowerPoint templates with built-in formatting; use styles with Word documents
Use headings (H1, H2, H3...) to denote importance of text.
PRACTICE #8 – PDF DOCUMENTS
Publish PDFs with optical character recognition (OCR).
PRACTICE #9 - ON BLACKBOARD
Videos and audio files are captioned and have transcripts
Any third party software or web sites are accessible or at least an alternative format used (run through an ADA compliance check)
Contact information is easy to find and email is used as a primary form of communication
PRACTICE #10 – USE AVAILABLE RESOURCES
Leslie Jewkes 208.562.3486 Christine Seideman 208.562.3377 Disability Services 208.562.3000 (One
Stop Student Services) Heather Grayson 208.562.2447
[email protected] Terri Scofield 208.562.3000 [email protected]
CURIOUS????
Run your course through a compliance check:
Accessibility On-Demand https://
www.ssbbartgroup.com/amp/index.php
Frey, Barbara, Edward Bowen and Christina Sax. "Ten Practices for Creating Accessible Online Courses." 4 November 2010. 17th Annual Sloan Consortium International Conference on Online Learning. PowerPoint. 18 February 2013. <http://sloanconsortium.org/2010aln/presentation/ten-practices-creating- accessible-online-courses>.