Best Practices for Accessibility

1
Best Practices for Accessibility

• Mike Elledge
• Assistant Director
• Usability Accessibility Center (UAC)
• elledge_at_msu.edu

2
Accessibility is about knowledge

• Your audiences challenges and needs
• Standards and how to apply them
• Prepare accessible course materials and websites
• Repair existing materials and sites

3
Your Audiences Challenges

• Cognitive
• Distracted/tired students
• Persons for whom English is a second language
• Persons with atypical learning styles
• Persons with cognitive deficits ADD, dyslexia
• Visual
• Persons with aging eyes
• People who are color blind
• Persons with very low vision, eye diseases
• Blind persons
• Hearing
• From minor to major
• Physical
• Muscle fatigue, temporary restrictions
• Carpal tunnel syndrome
• Quadriplegia

4
Your Audiences Needs

• Cognitive
• Plain language
• Hierarchical content
• Visual representations of concepts
• Consistency layouts, navigation, formats
• Visual
• Image descriptions
• Resizable fonts and layouts
• Meaning independent of color
• HTML code describing structure, content, and
  functionality
• Hearing
• Video captioning
• Non-audio prompts
• Physical
• Shortcuts
• Efficient navigation
• Clickable areas

5
Standards

• Section 508 Requirements
• Federal websites and products used by U.S.
  Government
• 16 criteria (a) thru (p)
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
• Universal recommendations
• Three levels Priority One (Must), Priority Two
  (Should), Priority Three (May)
• Both being rewritten to fit todays reality
• Interactive applications (AJAX)
• Dynamic content (DHTML)
• Improved software (JAWS and JavaScript)

6
Applying Standards

• Depends on organizations policy
• Cant go wrong designing to Section 508 and WCAG
  Priority One and Two
• More you do, the better the result

7
Prepare Accessible Course Materials and Sites

• Add 10-15 to development time
• Establish your criteria at the beginning
• Level of compliance
• MSU website template
• MSU styleguide
• Develop expertise or ask for help
• DreamWeaver accessibility prompts, Adobe PDF tags
• W3C and WebAIM tutorials
• LCTTP courses
• Usability Accessibility Center (UAC) workshops
  and consultation
• Anticipate issues and address them
• Best Involve audience in website and course
  design

8
Repair Course Materials and Websites

• Best to be compliant from the start or start anew
• But if you need to retrofit
• Identify issues Evaluate
• Identify best practice solutions W3C, WebAIM, A
  List Apart
• Implement throughout

9
Evaluate Course Materials and Websites

• Evaluate against standards
• Learn the UAC Accessibility Protocol
• Use the Big Three
• Manual checks (AIS Web Accessibility Toolbar,
  Mozilla Accessibility Extension for Firefox)
• Adaptive technology (JAWS, ZoomText)
• Accessibility checkers (ATRC Web Accessibility
  Checker, WAVE, Cynthia Says)Note
  Bobby/WatchFire and LIFT no longer available

10
Status of Web Accessibility Standards at MSU

• Statement of Encouragement since 1992
• MSU core values, commitment to diversity and
  inclusion
• MSU is moving toward a policy setting minimum
  standards for core sites