Pub101: Start with Accessibility 2025

At today's Pub101, Montana State University's Jacqueline Frank (she/her) shares her insight and recommendations for making OER accessible. Hosted by Cindy Gruwell (she, her, hers) from the University of West Florida, this session explores why accessibility matters, accessibility best practices, tips for using accessibility checkers, and accessibility resources/training options.

Watch the video recording of this session or keep reading for a full transcript. For those interested in reading the conversation that took place among participants and the resources shared, the chat transcript is also available below.

Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.

Cindy: Well, hello and welcome to the Open Education Network's Pub101. Thank you for joining us for today's session. My name is Cindy Gruwell from the University of West Florida and I'm also a member of the Pub101 Committee. I'll be your host and facilitator today. Soon I'll be handing it off to Jacqueline Frank from Montana State University to talk about accessibility. As always, we will leave time for your questions and conversation. There may be many of you who have experience with this topic in addition to our guests and we invite you to share your experiences and resources. Here are a few housekeeping details. We have an orientation document, which I am posting right now in chat that has information about the whole series of the Pub101 sessions with links to information that you can go to. We're recording this session and we'll add it to our YouTube Pub101 Spring 2025 playlist.

We are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone aligned within our community norms. Please join us in creating a safe and constructive space. To kick off today's conversation, we have a brief reflective question that I'm going to share and you can put responses in the chat session, and that's, if you've used an accessibility checker in the past, what did you find? And what accommodations do you use in your life? And those could be ramps, large print, voice to text. And now I'm going to hand things off to Jacqueline Frank who is the instructor and accessibility librarian at the Montana State University Library. She teaches information literacy, helps students with research, and works to improve library instruction and services to be more accessible and inclusive for everyone. Take it away, Jacqueline.

Jacqueline: Great, thank you. Thank you everyone for having me. Again, my name is Jacqueline Frank. I'm at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana and I'm the instruction and accessibility librarian there. So a lot of my accessibility work is focused on our instruction efforts and trying to make instruction and our resources more accessible. So today as we situate this within your Pub101 course, as you think about working with authors, it's good to think about accessibility from the beginning and know what to look out for, and know how to help authors along the way. So that's mainly what we're going to be talking about. We're going to start with a brief intro about why accessibility matters. It can give you a few talking points to pass on to other faculty or other instructors or authors and then we're going to spend the bulk of our time looking at some accessibility best practices to be aware of.

Also looking at some accessibility checkers that you could use, talking about AI and how that is and is not changing the accessibility landscape and open textbook formats because there are different formats. So just some things to be aware of there related to those accessibility best practices. And then at the end, we are going to talk about different models for ensuring accessibility on different campuses or at your institution and also reminding people that there are challenges along the way. We want to acknowledge those and give some reminders to take care of yourself along the way. And then we will have time for questions and discussions.

So first, I also am seeing some really great posts in the chat related to the opening reflection question. Some people use captions, it looks like a lot, using voice to text is another one and someone's trying to learn screen readers and increasing the color contrast on a phone, occasionally voice-to-text. Oh, dark mode. So it's other color contrast modes. Yeah, there are some great features and we will be talking about some of these along the way. So to first get started just talking about the accessibility mindset and why accessibility matters here we have our first user poll. So I want you guys to say how many people you think live in the US with a disability? Is it 5%, 13, 26 or 41%?

It looks like most people have answered, so I'll go ahead and share those results. The majority got it right. About half of you said 26%, which is correct. About 26 or one in four people live with a disability in the United States. So I'm going to move my poll screen out of the way here. So ultimately, open textbooks, one of the goals of creating open textbooks is that so they can be accessed by more people with fewer barriers. And ultimately accessibility will help us do that. So therefore we want to follow accessibility best practices to make sure that the most people can access them with fewer barriers. And a definition from Pub101 defines accessibility as the concept of designing websites, e-books, textbooks, and other products in such a way that removes barriers that people with disabilities can access the content.

And accessibility, universal design, and inclusive design, they all have slightly different definitions and nuances, but ultimately they all help us design content in a way that more users can access with more ease. So keeping all three of those in mind can really help users get more access to our content in the end. And we saw that 26% of people in the US live with a disability. That's also about 19% of undergraduate students report having a disability. And if you think about it, if you're lucky enough to live long enough, everyone will experience a disability at some point in life due to aging.

Accessibility can also be permanent, temporary, or situational. So temporary oftentimes we see injuries in Montana. Come wintertime, we see lots of people on knee scooters after having a skiing accident and sometimes you might just have your hands full and might not be able to use the same mobility devices that you would otherwise if you had your hands full for example. So again, accessibility is a range. It can be permanent to situational and it can also be invisible.

Quick note about Title II of the ADA. For those who are not aware, Title II of the ADA was passed into federal law about one year ago, and this relates to state and local entities, so any public institutions. And it basically just says that any online content must meet the WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines. WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. That has kind of been an industry standard for a really long time and Title II just codified that for public entities. There are staggered compliance deadlines either by next April or in two years of April 2027 depending on your population size. I'm just noting this here to say that there are laws that also back up this accessibility and we want to comply with those laws, but ultimately we just want to make it the content accessible by as many people as possible.

So jumping into the accessibility best practices, first I want to know how much accessibility knowledge or experience you guys already have. So here is poll number two. Please let me know if you have zero, low, moderate, or advanced prior knowledge. And it looks like the majority of you, about maybe two-thirds, have a moderate. Some have low previous knowledge, one person has some advanced skills. So for those of you that do come with prior knowledge and experience, please jump in and add any other comments to the chat, add any tips that you might have along the way because accessibility is really something that we can all learn from each other on. So please share. Okay, so jumping into the best practices, these are some of the most common best practices that we are going to talk about today. These come from those WCAG 2.1 guidelines and we're going to talk about some formatting considerations, headings using meaningful hyperlinks, considering color contrast, alt texts for images, and some specific guidelines for creating alt text, captions, and transcripts, and then some language considerations.

So first formatting, we want to always use non-serif fonts if possible and they just tend to be more readable. Some that are known to be good accessibility choices are Helvetica, Veranda and Arial are three and I believe the new Aptos, which is the new default in Microsoft. That one has also been designed with accessibility in mind. Using multiple spacing, so 1.5 to double line spacing if possible, but ultimately that just goes with the next bullet point to optimize white space. So when you use bullet points and lists, that can also help create some white space around the page and chunk up the content in different ways that helps the user scan the content a little bit easier. So ultimately it's best to avoid really long paragraphs and try to use bullet points, lists, and things like that. Then don't place text over images.

We see lots of memes and it's very common, but there are additional accessibility considerations. So for accessibility reasons, it's a best practice to not place a text directly over images. Headings are one of the most important formatting tool you can use, especially if you are doing textbooks. So they are a formatting tool. They are used to separate sections of a document. They ultimately help all users and screen readers navigate the content and they do that by acting as a map. So when they are applied in outline format for example, here is an image that kind of shows if you're thinking about a textbook, the book itself has a title and then multiple chapters, all of each chapter title would be formatted as a heading two, then the sub-chapters would all be formatted as a heading three.

So you go down in order and you can't skip a level when going down. So if you had, your chapter levels were heading twos, you wouldn't want to skip a level two a heading four for subchapters. That would be an order you'd want that to be a heading three instead. Let me know if you have questions on that and the formatting tool of headings, it allows visual users to see what section they are in and jump ahead and it also does the same thing for screen readers. When you apply the heading style in the background in a Word document, for example, if you are using a screen reader, it allows the user to pull up just a list of those headings and then jump ahead to one of those sections in the document.

Meaningful hyperlinks. Meaningful hyperlinks tell users where the link is going to take them. So rather than typing in or avoid pasting in the full long URL, you want the link to be the title of the content itself and you also want to avoid using click here as a link. So here are a couple of examples. So a good example of what this looks like is chat with us from the MSU Library homepage and the text MSU Library homepage is hyperlinked with that URL in the background. The bad example might be click here to chat with the MSU Library or a different example would be chat with the MSU Library from this link and then pasting in that full URL. The reason why click here is not a great option is again for screen readers and also for visual users.

So if the standard formatting is to change links to blue text with the underline and if you scan a page, it's a lot easier to see MSU Library homepage versus click here and knowing where it's taking you. Also with screen readers, you can again call up a list of links, but if it called up the list of links for the bad example, it would read out to you the option to either just click here but you might not remember where that link was meant to take you or if it link reads out the full long URL, that's not a great experience either.

I see a question in the comment here. I've read that you don't want to have links open in a new tab or page but rather open in the same page. Is that correct? Mostly yes, that is correct, and that allows users to navigate forward and back easier. So if you open up a new tab, you can't as easily use keyboard shortcuts and ways to go back to that different tab. So that's one reason why that's a best practice. One consideration that I have seen is, so for example on our MSU Library page, anything that links out to another Montana State University webpage, it's always an internal link and it opens in the same tab. If we link out to a document that is not MSU-created, that is the one time when we tend to link directly out to that page because it's not content that we have created.

So there, yes, and does an opening a new tab indicate the information is on another site? That was yes, kind of the example that I was getting at. So generally if you want to open within the same tab most of the time, unless you are going to another site is a general best practice. There are different nuances and reasons, but yeah, good question. And I'm also seeing another comment about white space so that adding extra white space means longer and expanded space for content. I'm always assuming that scrolling could be an access issue as well. So should I default to more pages and digital content? This is a great example of sometimes these best practices can conflict with each other and ultimately having a longer scrolling document could become an access issue. So I think it is something that you have to balance.

I tend to go more towards adding white space and allowing users to... It helps scan the content a little bit easier, but you have to balance those and you do have to make some judgment choices along the way. So I don't have a simple answer for you on that one and ultimately it's kind of deciding how long is it going to make your content and what are the trade-offs. Okay, moving on, consider color. Ensuring high color contrast of text is usually fairly easy because most of the time we are in black and white text or with blue and white text with links, but diagrams and charts are also we need to make sure that they meet color contrast as well. And then you also don't want to rely on color alone to convey meaning. So what that means is if you for example, had a note in a paragraph and you only change the color to red text that if you missed that or were color blind or didn't see that, then using color alone that content could be missed.

So what you want to do is either bold it as well as change the color. You could add a capital note beforehand. There are multiple ways to do that, but if you're drawing attention to something with color, don't use color alone. There is one color contrast checker here that I really like to use. It does download it to your computer, but then it uses a color dropper where you can click on the background color and the text color or between two colors and an image and it will tell you if it meets the WCAG single A or double A guidelines.

Alt text is another really important one, especially for textbooks that might have images in them. Alt text is just a written description of an image. Ultimately it is used mainly by screen readers where it's read in place of an image, but also sometimes if you have privacy settings locked down on your computer, some images don't automatically load and it can show the alt text in its place. So the alt text and then also if an image maybe doesn't load properly or you're in a place with limited bandwidth, that alt text would be displayed. And we do have full alt-text guidelines with some more detailed information, but briefly, the alt-text guidelines really start with considering the context. Is it purely decorative? If it's not giving any other information, you can mark it as decorative and move on and you don't have to enter alt text.

If it does provide context or information in some way, then you want to put that context into the alt text. You want to be as concise as possible, usually just one or two sentences. Don't repeat information that's provided elsewhere, maybe within a paragraph that references the image. Try to be objective, don't try to interpret or analyze, and then also try to apply the same writing style, tone, and terminology to the other content. And then charts and graphs, they are more complex. Again, the resource on the previous slide has full information about charts and graphs. This one, it's best to describe it, the chart and graph, but then also link out to the full data table because the data tables versus charts and graphs have different accessibility considerations and then the user could use that data table if they needed to.

I see a question. Sometimes alt text ends up being longer than the recommended length. Any thoughts on how to handle this issue? It's a challenge I will say. One thing that comes to mind is, I have not used this before, but if you come up with a lengthy description, you could try asking AI if it could shorten it for you and then as a human, see if you agree or not with some of the choices, if it still is conveying that information. Ultimately I don't have a great answer for you. Maybe get with a colleague that has a more brief writing style than you and then really think about the specific intent and do you need all of that context? Are you actually just describing it or are you describing the pieces that are important for the context? That is ultimately the easiest way to make sure it's as brief as possible is you're only providing exactly the information that you need.

But yes, it's a challenge and captions and transcripts. These are different. Captions appear within a video and are synchronous to the audio. Transcripts are a separate document of the audio, but they ultimately both help people with hearing and visual impairments because they might help someone who doesn't have access to the audio. And then you could turn on the captions or read the transcript instead for people who use English as a second language or maybe you are in a noisy or quiet environment and you don't want to listen to the sound and they also help people with visual impairments if you are maybe listening to a video. But then you could also use the transcript and listen to the transcript and jump ahead or search the document for a specific word to find where they were talking about a specific topic.

You can generate automatic captions using YouTube and so that is one free option for everyone. Other campuses on our campus we have access to Panopto. That is a screen recording tool software and it allows you to either record something directly or you can upload videos and that also has an automatic caption feature. So depending on your institution, you may have other software available, but YouTube is one particular choice. And then some language considerations. Just try to be clear, concise and avoid or explain jargon. It's best to avoid jargon, but honestly, if you're offering a textbook, you might not be able to avoid jargon.

So if you are using a term for the first time trying to explain and add definitions, or maybe if it's a textbook, there's a full glossary in the back to help address that. Spelling out acronyms with textbooks it is, you always want to spell out the acronym first and then you can continue using it. Sometimes it might be useful to remind folks along the way. So maybe you spell out an acronym first at the beginning of every chapter and then you continue using it that way. If someone is new to the textbook and they jump straight to chapter seven, then they don't have to find what that new acronym is, and avoiding abbreviations is always best too.

Accessibility checkers. There are some accessibility checkers and there are built-in checkers into Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. There if it's in different places, depending on what version of Word you use, but it should always be there if you go to file, check for issues, and check accessibility and that should pull up the accessibility checker. That flags some different considerations and then you can click on them whether it's a warning or an error and then it tries to give you some steps and instructions on how to fix it. PDFs, if you have access to Adobe Acrobat Pro, they have an accessibility checker. That one is available if you find the more tools option. And then there is an action wizard to make it accessible and then that walks you through some of the different options and pulls up an option in PDF to auto-tag, which then will look for what's text versus what's images.

It will prompt you to then add alt text to those images. I will say if you are resulting in a PDF, it is often easier to make the original document more accessible first and then that will make your life much easier in finalizing the PDF accessibility. You always have an extra step of finalizing the PDF, but if your original document is more accessible, that will make that final step a lot easier in PDF. For online resources and HTML documents, there is also a WAVE accessibility checker. You can just grab a URL and paste it in and it will look through any of your online webpage content.

Color contrast. I mentioned this earlier, color contrast has not always been included in accessibility checkers. So I believe it is now included in Word, but it hasn't always been. So there are... Sorry, I just got a message. There are two options that I like to use for web pages. You can again use the WAVE tool, that one does check color contrast, but I mentioned the one to download is the last one on this slide is the Paciello Group's Color Contrast Checker and that one you download and you can use a dropper to select two different colors. The WebAim Color Contrast Checker is somewhat similar, but it doesn't have the dropper tool.

So what's great about accessibility checkers is that they're a great last check, but they don't check everything. They don't check if headers are used, they don't check reading order, they don't check things like universal design or inclusive design where you have inclusive examples. So ultimately you have to still check yourself. And so it's good to know about accessibility best practices and what they are looking for and therefore you know a little bit more again, what to look for. A quick note about AI and digital accessibility. AI is a hot topic right now. AI is definitely improving some things. AI is ultimately what is behind some of those accessibility checkers, but we still need a human check because we've seen that those accessibility checkers don't check everything. They can't check everything for us. So again, that's why knowing about these best practices and knowing what to look for, knowing ahead of time what to help authors watch out for and how to format their OER along the way can be really helpful rather than waiting until the end and having to go back and doing a whole other kind of formatting revamp.

Now there are a few different open textbook formats. There are lots of different document types. Some are just a PDF, some are an Epub, Audiobooks, Pressbooks, they all have different accessibility considerations is the takeaway. Some allows you to enlarge text and that will reflow the text so you don't have to scroll side to side. Some support multiple columns. The takeaway here is that they all have different accessibility considerations and therefore it's best to save in multiple formats. So this example OER with multiple formats. We just pull it up here. We have an online HTML version, a PDF, there's an ebook, there's an open document format. So there when you start with your original document, if you can save in multiple formats, that is best because providing options is one of the main tenets of universal design and it allows users to pick the option that works best for them.

Okay, now models for ensuring accessibility. This one is really important to think about on your campus and your institution. Ultimately the creator of or the author, the original author of the content is generally responsible for accessibility. However, as publishers or someone who is helping authors, we also want to help make sure that the published content is accessible. And again, that means knowing what to look out for and providing resources to authors to help them follow those best practices. And as we saw with Title II of the ADA, any public libraries or universities, state institutions need to ensure the content meets accessibility requirements by law. And we also just want to make that content accessed by as many people as possible. So what does that mean? If the author is responsible, but we try to help ensure it. This could look like a centralized model where one person is versed in these accessibility best practices, knows what to check for and then either helps the authors update the content, but most institutions don't have the personnel or the expertise for this.

This is taking on kind of that extra layer of work. So while this provides more support to the authors, this might not be a reality. So a distributed model is again, passing it back to the authors who are responsible for providing that accessible content. But maybe you provide resources so the author can learn on their own. That's most common where you have your accessibility standards kind of published and you can share that with authors and then share resources for them to make sure that they meet that or something in between.

So with that in mind, I am curious about the next... Oh, sorry, I do have a poll question coming, but first related to these different models, communicating responsibility will be important. So you want to make sure to include the accessibility requirements in both a call for proposal, author guidelines, any kind of MOUs if you have those along the way and try to be as specific as possible linking to the guidelines that you want to meet. Right now, the industry standard is WCAG 2.1, and then clearly outline the author's responsibilities and how the library does or how the library can support that, what you will or will not do.

Okay, so now with this in mind, I want to know what you think makes most sense for your campus. Do you think a centralized or distributed, somewhere in between, or aiming for one but maybe more the other in reality? I'll go back in my slides here so you can see. Looks like in reality most people are somewhere in between, a couple centralized, a couple distributed, and then one who's aiming for centralized definitely makes sense, but in reality maybe don't have the personnel and two that are vice versa, aiming to maybe be more distributed but need to actually do some more of that work yourself. That I'm not surprised.

It's all over the map and it really depends on your campus and your institution. So trying to communicate those responsibilities and figure out what works best for you will end up being the best for sure and challenges and self-care. The challenges for sure are that it is a distributed responsibility. Even if you have a centralized model or someone that does have accessibility knowledge, the reality is that authors are still responsible for trying to make their content accessible and we want to help pass resources back and forth. However, authors often expect others to do it for them.

It can often be seen as an add-on if you're not thinking about accessibility at the beginning and then you get to the end where you want to publish and you then have this extra thing that you have to do to make sure it's accessible. A lot of that comes from just not having an awareness or understanding of it from the beginning. Time is a huge one. Obviously, time is a challenge in all of our lives it seems like. And both to learn about accessibility, but then also to create the accessible material and then the reality that what works for one person doesn't work for everyone. Underestimating... Sorry, what works for one person doesn't work for everyone. So therefore a hundred percent accessible isn't going to exist. You might always need to tweak something, even if you've made it as accessible as possible for the general standards, you might still need to tweak something for a particular user if that comes up.

That's probably not going to be your responsibility though but that is a challenge with accessibility in general. And the last one, underestimating the need or impact is a big challenge. So hopefully you have some talking points if you encounter authors along the way who don't think it has a big impact. So I want to wrap up by saying perfection is not the goal. And as I mentioned earlier, 100% accessible doesn't exist. So be kind to yourself, try to do as best as we can, and just acknowledge that there are a lot of those challenges. And by trying to pay attention to accessibility, we will only make it better than it would have been before.

There are lots of resources and training options if you would like to look at them further. Lots can be found online. There are specific resources linked from the Pub101 unit including creating alt text descriptions and a checklist for accessibility. And then there is one lib guide from me that has instructions for creating accessible documents, including PDFs, Word documents, things like that. But now what additional questions do you have and/or what would you like to talk about more? I see this question, if I were to include a diagram with the structure of a cell, I would also put the information in the text. It is not a decorative image, however, is it okay to have alt text like diagram of cell structure? All information given in the image is described in the text of this chapter.

Off the top of my head, I will admit I'm not an alt-text expert, but that seems really reasonable to me. The only thing that might come into play, maybe it doesn't matter, I have to remember my old biology skills, but it's like does the relational position of different things within the cell make a difference? And maybe that is what's shown in the image versus what's described. Maybe each of those elements are described. If that relational position matters, you would want to maybe add that to the alt text too. But yes, if you don't want to just skip it completely, you can call it out, tell these user what it is, but then yeah, tell them they're not missing any information. That does seem like a valid way to go for that.

I also see a comment that WAVE has a browser add-on that I found very helpful. Yes, the WAVE tool that I mentioned, that's one of the accessibility checkers and there are two ways that you can use it. You can actually go to wave.com and paste in your URL or it has a browser add-on if you're going to be using it a lot, which I have also used and that is really great. And another question, do you know of specialized accessibility rules for specific types of works, reproduction, public domain music scores, or specific software for reproducing public domain music scores that's accessible? I do not is the short answer.

I am aware of a few areas of challenges. Music scores is definitely one of them. And then there's a whole other suite of challenges within the STEM and sciences, but I have not found great best practices for that. I have found some information discussing the challenges. Some what I've seen is music scores have been reprinted into braille or tactile music scores. So rather than alt text, it comes into a different physical form. I've seen that as one potential possibility but not a great answer for you for OER. I would have to look up and see if some more information has been done with that.

You have a recommended screen reader to check online content on a browser. I don't know that this is a recommendation, but what I use is the Microsoft tool that's called Narrator. It's not very user-friendly, I would say. I've gotten used to it to do exactly what you're saying just to check online content in a browser. So I've used Narrator through Microsoft and I have also been meaning to look at some other options and try to actually delve into learning JAWS or a different actual screen reader. Within PDFs, I also, there is a Read Out Loud feature within Adobe Pro. So if I am trying to make a PDF accessible, I tend to use the Read Out Loud feature directly within PDF also. So those are the two that I've used to varying degrees of success. I am not a screen reader user and they are. So I have started scratching the surface. I'm a beginner user and the learning curve is steep.

Cindy: I'm going to go ahead and say thank you, Jacqueline. We appreciate you sharing your experience with us today. And thank you all for joining us as we continue to learn about open textbook publishing. We hope that as we continue to share available resources and recommendations, one of your key takeaways is the sense that you're not alone in figuring out how to support open textbook authors, and we look forward to seeing you all next week.

Jacqueline: Thanks, everyone.
 



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00:15:37 Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni: Howdy everyone! :)
00:15:56 Karen Lauritsen: Hello!
00:16:06 Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni: Reacted to "Hello!" with 👋
00:16:38 CIndy Gruwell: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l5A2okUKSVi0SqzoYELjYnsTs7DResOf6zwdr2oU14A/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.o6l9eukyoio4
00:17:31 Karen Lauritsen: If you’ve used an accessibility checker in the past, what did you find? What accommodations do you use in your life (subtitles, ramps, large print, voice to text)?
00:17:49 Karen Lauritsen: I use voice to text all the time.
00:17:55 Amanda Larson: I use captions all the time!
00:18:18 Amanda Larson: I usually find that folks don't structure their headings appropriately.
00:18:39 Stephanie Wiegand: I use voice to text a lot; but I am trying to learn screen readers for my mother who has macular degeneration.
00:18:41 Carmen Cole: Replying to "I usually find that ..." I also use captions all the time!
00:18:57 Cheryl Casey: Reacted to "I use captions all t..." with 👍🏻
00:19:00 Karen Lauritsen: Reacted to "I use voice to text ..." with ❤️
00:19:23 Jessica McClean: I just increased the contrast on my phone, and it has made a huge difference already.
00:19:31 Stephanie Wiegand: Reacted to "I use captions all t..." with 👍
00:19:34 Carmen Cole: Reacted to "I just increased the..." with 👍🏻
00:19:36 Jessica McClean: Reacted to "I use captions all t..." with 👍
00:19:43 Karen Lauritsen: Reacted to "I just increased the..." with 👍🏻
00:19:56 CIndy Gruwell: Occasionally voice to text and captions all the time
00:20:01 Cheryl Casey: Replying to "If you’ve used an ac..." I use subtitles and large print all the time.
00:20:14 Christine Rickabaugh: Reacted to "I use subtitles and ..." with 💯
00:20:26 Amanda Larson: oh and dark mode!
00:20:34 Melissa Chim: Replying to "If you’ve used an ac..." I use subtitles too!
00:21:08 Emily Stenberg: Reacted to "I use subtitles and ..." with 💯
00:21:14 Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni: I use WebAIM's WAVE in my work often, and it has helped me identify accessibility issues of published works. I use all of these accommodations depending on the context--like reading subtitles while watching Columbo on the treadmill, which I love! 🤩
00:21:38 Stephanie Wiegand: I use headings in Word/PowerPoint all the time, but I am always in a quandary of whether or not to use titles. Someone told me they are not accessible.
00:22:02 Carmen Cole: Reacted to "oh and dark mode!" with 💯
00:22:51 Karen Lauritsen: Reacted to "I use WebAIM's WAVE ..." with 😀
00:26:00 Karen Lauritsen: https://www.ada.gov/resources/2024-03-08-web-rule/
00:26:01 Amanda Larson: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/
00:33:06 Stephanie Wiegand: Adding extra white space means longer/expanded space for content; I've always assumed that scrolling could be an access issue as well - so should I always default to more pages in digital content?
00:34:15 Jennie Simning: I've read that you don't want to have links open in a new tab or page, but rather open in the same page. Is that correct?
00:36:08 Lora Amsberryaugier: Doesn't opening in a new tab indicate that the information is on another site?
00:36:53 Jennie Simning: Great Thank you!
00:42:46 Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni: Sometimes the alt texts end up being longer than the recommended length. Any thoughts on how to handle this issue?
00:44:11 Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni: Great, thank you!
00:46:04 Stephanie Wiegand: If I were to include a diagram with the structure of a cell, I would also put the information in the text. It is not a decorative image however. Is it okay to have Alt Text like "diagram of cell structure; all information given in the image is described in the text of this chapter"?
00:49:53 Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni: WAVE also has a browser add-on that I have found very helpful.
01:00:15 Stephanie Wiegand: Do you know of specialized accessibility rules for specific types of works - e.g., reproduction of public domain music scores? Or specific software for reproducing public domain music scores that accessible?
01:07:51 Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni: Do you have a recommended screen reader to check online content on a browser?
01:09:33 Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni: Thank you!
01:10:07 Karen Lauritsen: To prep for next week, please review CFP and MOU modules (if you haven’t already) in our curriculum.
01:10:14 Christine Rickabaugh: Reacted to "To prep for next wee..." with 👍🏻
01:10:39 Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni: Thank you so much, incredibly helpful!
01:10:39 Karen Lauritsen: Bye! Thank you!
01:10:40 Micah Gjeltema: Thanks so much, Jacqueline!