Welcome to the Great Lakes ADA and Accessible IT Center's monthly Bulletin on Accessible IT in K-12 schools.

Trainings & Events

The Great Lakes Center offers technical assistance, trainings, referrals, and resource material for K-12 and Postsecondary schools on Accessible Information Technology topics.

Resources on Website Accessibility

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) includes fourteen guidelines and detailed checkpoints for each. www.w3.org/TR/
WAI-WEBCONTENT/#toc

The Guide to the 508 Standards on Websites Applications and Operating Systems (1194.22). www.access-board.gov/sec508/
guide/1194.22.htm

AccVerify website evaluation and reporting tool AccVerify can run as a standalone or integrated product. www.hisoftware.com/access

A-Prompt from the University of Toronto is a free tool to help the author repair issues. http://aprompt.snow.utoronto.ca

Incorporating Electronic Text in the Classroom (Part I of II)

Many students with disabilities can benefit from the flexibility and versatility that digital text offers in the classroom.

Unlike a printed book, which can present only text and images, digital media can display content in many formats – text, still image, sound, moving image, combinations of text on video, sound in text, video in text, and more. Compared to print this versatility is amazing. Digital text can dramatically increase the accessibility for students with a variety of disabilities. For example, students who have trouble seeing small text can increase its size; those who have trouble understanding speech can slow the speech down or increase its volume or a teacher can set up a computer to read words aloud on demand for a student with dyslexia.

Digital media allows the same content to be displayed in multiple ways for the needs of many users. New standards make access even more automatic by making it possible to create content just once and then provide opportunities for multiple outputs based on each learner. For example, the same digital text in a web page can be displayed in a browser, printed, used for refreshable Braille, or spoken with high quality synthetic speech. It can be displayed and spoken on desktop computers, notebook computers, handheld PC's, personal digital assistants, and digital portable telephones.

Even with all of its advantages, incorporating digital texts efficiently in the classroom can be a challenge for teachers. One effective approach is modifying the instructional approach to incorporate technology, called Universal Design for Learning. The central practical premise of Universal Design for Learning is that a curriculum should include alternatives to make it accessible and appropriate for individuals with different backgrounds, learning styles, and disabilities.

To learn more about the Universal Design for Learning approach visit the Center for Applied Technology (CAST) at www.cast.org.

Part II in the April issue of the K-12 Bulletin on Accessible IT Initiative will discuss where to find digital text and how to create your own.

How Can I Tell If My Website Is Accessible?

There are many resources available to check the accessibility of your website, including legal standards, validation checkers, checklists, guidelines, and development tools to help schools develop and maintain accessible web resources.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) developed the first set of formal guidelines for accessible web content called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) in 1999. W3C is a leader in the web accessibility and has a wealth of resources on its website.

The only legal standard on accessible websites was developed by the Access Board as a requirement of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (1998), which applies to entities receiving federal assistance. There are sixteen standards, and the Access Board provides a detailed explanation of each through its Guide to the Standards.

There are automated evaluation and repair tools available and they can play a vital role, particularly in assessing large sites. Most of the products available in this category include the ability to spider websites, following links to other internal pages and including those linked pages in their assessment. Given this ability, these software tools are able to evaluate very large quantities of websites, whereas conducting a similarly large manual evaluation is not practical.

However, many website accessibility issues are subjective and cannot be assessed without manual inspection, for example a software tool can identify when ALT text is missing, but it cannot determine if the text of an ALT tag is appropriate.

Web Accessibility in Mind (WebAIM) recommends the following process in evaluating website accessibility, including:

1. Validate your HTML
2. Validate for accessibility
3. Check for keyboard accessibility
4. Test in a screen reader
5. Check your pages for WCAG compliance
6. Conduct user testing with individuals with disabilities

In conclusion, there are clear guidelines, free tools, and important reasons for schools to make their websites accessible. Let's do it!