Digital accessibility essentials: Basic digital accessibility for educators presentation

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Here are some links to my Digital accessibility essentials presenation that I presented to a group of educators in Extension on May 2, 2024:

The presentation covers the Whys of accessibility (empathy & compliance), the Hows of accessibility (how to use assistive technology), and the Whats of accessibility (what to do to ensure good digital accessibility). The Hows of accessibility section shows how people with visual disabilities use screen readers to consume digital content and highlights how to get started with screen reader testing.

The screen readers mentioned in the presentation are the traditional kind that read live text from websites and documents already on the user’s device. Below are some links to a new group of other apps the actually read text out in the environment to help people with visual disabilities.

Information about other assistive technologies

Here are some other tools and apps, different from traditional screen readers, that can help the visually impaired: https://business.bemyeyes.com/10-essential-accessibility-tools-apps-for-the-visually-impaired

Apps like TapTapSee, Google’s Lookout, SuperSense, or MS Seeing AI use a smartphone’s camera and voiceover capabilities to take a picture or video of anything in the environment and identify it with a voice in real time.

What to do to ensure good digital accessibility

The presentation covers using the accessibility checkers built into MS Office products like Word and PowerPoint to check the accessibility of our digital documents. It also covers how there are similar accessibility checkers in learning management systems like Canvas that can help use ensure good digital accessibility in our online courses. For those of us doing blog posting as part of our educational efforts, the WAVE tool, is essential. It’s an easy way to check webpages for accessibility issues and is available as a browser extension.