Accessibility

Building accessibility into your content from the very beginning of the project benefits all students. In addition to be available to students using screen readers (or students that need to change the font, enlarge font, etc.), accessible content is generally well organized and presented in a variety of ways.

Attribution: “Open Dialogues: Open education and accessibility” by CTLT, University of British Columbia [Youtube] is licensed CC BY 4.0.

The following acts as a starting point--it can serve as a quick checklist to review/ mark off as you're creating new materials:

Organizing Content

Content is organized under headings and subheadings
Headings and subheadings are used sequentially (e.g. Heading 1 then heading 2 then heading 3, etc.)

Images

Images that convey information include Alternative Text (alt-text) descriptions of the image’s content or function (Pressbooks has an alt-text field)
- If the image is too complex to be described by alt-text, then the content is written out as a paragraph or in narrative form as well as presented in the image. This may be required when presenting a graph, map, or chart.
Images do not rely on color to convey information
Images that are purely decorative contain empty or ommitted completely

Links

Where the link is placed is meaningful (i.e. add the hyperlink on a word that is descriptive) and does not use generic text such as “click here” or “read more”
Links don't open in new windows

Font Size and Contrast

Use 12 point for body text. For most documents, body text should be around 12 points. Small fonts may be illegible for some audiences.
Use 9 point for footnotes. If a document contains footnotes or endnotes, the minimum size should be 9 points.
Consider using the WCAG Contrast Checker tool to ensure that students with color blindness can view the text

Multimedia (Video page has more resources)

A transcript has been made available for a multimedia resource that includes audio narration or instruction. Transcript includes:
- Speaker’s name
- All speech content
- Descriptions of relevant non-speech audio

Tables

Tables include row and column headers
Tables include title or caption

Helpful Resources/ References

BC Campus Open Education Accessibility Toolkit