Reading Time: 3 minutesLast post, we talked about the importance of captions, best practices for graphics, and tips for writing good alt text. Today, we’re looking at two other aspects of accessibility and usability – using color properly and working with text. Color Using color can be a powerful way to accentuate the information you’re presenting. But color shouldn’t be used as the only way to draw attention to or distinguish items. It’s easy to put warnings or urgent information in red, but that kind of visual indicator just doesn’t work for everyone. People who are red/green colorblind, for example, can have trouble distinguishing between and identifying those colors –…
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Accessibility Best Practices: Captioning, Graphics, and Alt Text
Reading Time: 5 minutesToday, we’re going to dive into some accessibility best practices to implement into your courses. We’ll be looking at media in this post, and in our next, we’ll be talking about color and text. Captioning Captioning is likely one of the first things people think of when considering accessibility, and rightfully so. But it isn’t only beneficial for people who are deaf. Captions are helpful when people are in a loud, distracting, or public environment, especially if they forgot earbuds at home. With a captioned video, a student who forgot earbuds in the dorm could still work on that last piece of homework while all their roommates…
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Introduction to Accessibility Series
Reading Time: < 1 minuteOver the next few posts, we’ll be diving into accessibility. It’s easy to hear “accessibility” and think of captions for videos, but more goes into it than just that. Instead of focusing on just specific practices (which are important and we’ll cover), we’ll start with an overarching principle – designing for the whole person, and not the disability (21 Kalbag). If you base your work, whether it’s designing an element or building a course, on empathy and understanding (and good pedagogy), usability and inclusion will be “baked into” the result. This type of designing for the whole person is an element of universal design,…
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Three Tips to Improve Accessibility in Your Course
Reading Time: 2 minutesLet’s make sure we all start on the same page by defining our terms. When talking about “accessibility” related to the web or course materials, it’s easy to think about it in a context of screen readers and disability accommodations. But it’s more than that. According to the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, accessibility means that products are not only designed in a way that people with disabilities can use them but also people who have “situational limitations” (being in a location where they cannot use their device as they typically would) or “temporary disabilities” (an injury that affects how they handle their devices). Today we’re going to…