What you should know about making digital content accessible
Accessibility is about considering the varying abilities of students when you share digital course content. Depending on the type of content, different considerations will apply. However, the core principle remains the same:
Making digital content accessible means adding secondary layers of design and explanation to the content, so students of all physical abilities can learn from what is presented on the screen.
Secondary layers of design and explanation for accessibility typically include
- information about written content that indicates its structure
- descriptions of visual content that explain what is represented
- transcriptions of auditory content that show what is being said
Many accessibility features enable digital content to be read to students
Screen readers, a type of software that “reads” text on a computer screen, are essential to people who are blind or visually impaired. They may also be used by people with learning disabilities who have challenges with written text or by people with physical limitations that make a mouse or touchpad difficult to maneuver. Screen readers may communicate text through speech or braille (the latter using a touch keypad). They will also read text that may not be visible, such as alternative text. In addition, screen readers read aloud the document structure and allow the user to navigate a document, as long as the document includes proper tagging,
It is therefore important that the content meet basic accessibility guidelines to enable—and not hinder—student learning.
Screen Reader Demo
The University of California, San Francisco has this short screen reader demo that may be helpful to view. It demonstrates how accessibility improvements impact a person’s experience with a screen reader.
It is critical to review if accessibility terms mean what you think
The language around accessibility sometimes uses terms that you may be familiar with from other contexts—but in the context of accessibility, they may mean something different. For example, “tagging” of digital content may make you think of adding names or hashtags to a social media post or tags to a blog post. With accessibility, however, it refers to the process of making PDFs and other documents that properly “tag” or mark content as a particular type (e.g., heading, paragraph, table, image) for screen readers.
Reviewing the definitions below can help you understand common terminology and identify the most useful areas for improvement in your digital content.
- Alternative text
- Alternative text (or alt text) is a description attached to a visual element that a screen reader will read to students when they reach the visual. Students with slower devices or connections that prevent the visual from downloading will also see this description instead of the visual. It is important to note that alt text is different from a caption. A caption is text for a visual that is shown to everyone and often supplements the visual. Alt text is shown or read only to those who need it and should fully describe the visual’s key content and purpose, since it acts as a substitute for being able to see the image.
- Closed Captions
- Closed captions are text representations of the audio in a media file. Unlike subtitles, closed captions include non-speech elements, such as sound effects, that are important to understanding media in full.
- Colour contrast
- Colour contrast refers to the contrast between layered elements on a page, whether you are using colour or only black-and-white or gray tones. To support visibility for more students, the intensity of your foreground elements (e.g., text, visuals) should be significantly different than the intensity of your background (e.g., page, table cell). You can roughly check your contrast by printing to a hard copy or PDF in black-and-white or gray tones. For a more exact check, you can use accessibility-checking tools (when available) or hexadecimal numbers of the colours, as explained below.
- Decorative
- A decorative visual is one that you use only for design purposes, such as to break up the text or provide visual interest. These visuals can be removed from the document without any loss of understanding. Screen readers do not communicate information about decorative visuals as they don’t provide important information to people who can’t see them.
- Header
- A header is typically the first row and/or column of a table that describes the content in the respective rows or columns that follow. A header must be specifically designated as a header in the application the table is created in. Visually differentiating headers by styling the first row or column of a table differently is insufficient, since the visual change is not communicated by a screen reader.
- Heading
- A heading is text that indicates a new section of content. A heading must be specifically designated as a heading. It is not enough to visually differentiate headings with your own style (e.g., by using bold text or increasing the font size), since the visual change is not communicated by a screen reader.
- Heading level
- A heading level is a hierarchical number assigned to each heading to create an outline or structure for the content. This structure should have a logical flow, starting with at least one first-level heading and using lower-level headings to indicate sub-sections. Students using screen readers rely on this heading structure to navigate the content.
- Optical Character Recognition
- Optical Character Recognition (or OCR) is the process by which the text or characters in a scanned file are converted to readable and editable content. Using OCR is important for scanned files, as it allows screen readers to read the content rather than interpret the scan only as a single, unreadable image. Adobe Acrobat Pro can help you apply OCR to a PDF. All UBC faculty and staff can access Adobe Acrobat Pro for a yearly subscription fee.
- Tagging
- Tagging adds structure to a PDF and other documents, enabling students to understand and navigate the content when using a screen reader. Tagged documents identify each piece of content as a particular type (e.g., heading, paragraph, table, image). To ensure tags are added correctly, it is important to properly designate headers and headings in your file.
- Transcript
- A transcript is a text version of audio and other content in a multimedia file. Unlike closed captioning, transcripts do not necessarily work alongside the original media source. Therefore, they should include descriptions of any visual content and note the speakers’ name each time the speaker changes.