Improving Webpage Accessibility for Students: Strategies for Faculty

Putting your course materials and other academic resources on the web makes the information widely available and accessible to students any time, any place. However, it can also present particular difficulties for students with disabilities. A new resource from the Senate Committee on Libraries and Information Technology, the University Secretariat and the Centre for the Support of Teaching aims to help educate the university community about these issues, as well as show how to get started on improving the accessibility of course web pages.

The Issues

Most webpage accessibility issues arise when information is presented in a form that cannot be perceived by some students.

Example: Your page contains images.
Issue: A student with a visual disability who uses screen reading software can only access the information conveyed by the images if equivalent text is provided for the screen reader to recite.

Example: Different coloured text is used to differentiate correct and incorrect answers in an exam review.
Issue: A colour-blind individual might not be able to distinguish the colour differences and be unable to make sense of the page.

So — with more and more courses and course materials going online, consider adding some accessibility features into your webpages. But how? Is it difficult or time-consuming?

A "Made at York" Solution

Take a look at York’s Web Accessibility Site: http://www.yorku.ca/webaccess. Web accessibility isn’t a new idea — there have been standards and resources available on the web for some time, many of them geared to web professionals. So why would we create a new web accessibility site at York? First, to demonstrate our institution’s commitment to supporting the use of these strategies; and second, to take a practical, non-technical approach to accessibility principles so that even beginners to web page creation can make a positive difference for their students.

Many faculty members and others who post most of the material that ends up on course webpages are not professional web designers, so York’s web accessibility site doesn’t attempt to teach formal standards which can be intimidating to the time-conscious web novice, and it doesn’t expect its audience to learn everything all at once. Instead, it assumes that readers will be more inclined to incorporate web accessibility features into their site if the steps are quick and easy to learn and apply.

This approach to web accessibility training and the focus on the amateur learner are not new, but York’s site differs in that it is entirely organized according to these principles. The Get Started "learning path" provides three simple steps for incorporating some basic web accessibility features into your webpages:

• Read the Introduction to Web Accessibility Issues, and visit the student experience section to try some activities that help to present accessibility issues from the students’ perspective.
• Take the Simple Strategies Tutorial to learn some easy techniques to improve the accessibility of your webpages now.
• Refer to the accessibility checklist for the common "do's" and "don'ts" of web accessibility at this level.

Readers are invited to return to learn more later, after taking time to let the first lessons become part of their regular practice. More advanced levels of web accessibility will be part of the website starting in September 2005.

Improving Accessibility Improves Usability for Everyone

The great benefit of improving accessibility for students with disabilities is that it usually improves the quality of Web pages for all of our students:

• Describing a complex image, table or diagram in the text of your page makes the information available to students who can't see, and can assist sighted students who may have difficulty interpreting the visual information.
• Using headings consistently (and generously) is important not only to students with visual or learning disabilities, but to everyone who finds a clearly-structured document easier to understand and read on screen.
• A text transcript of an audio clip benefits deaf students, and can be a valuable tool to help hearing students to concentrate more effectively as they listen.

Finally, an accessible website is generally more usable for students in a wide variety of situations, such as those who have older computers and slow Internet connections, or those who use a handheld computer to browse the Internet in text-only mode.

Other Resources

For more reading on web accessibility strategies and standards, see:

• W3C Web Accessibility Initiative: http://www.w3.org/WAI/

W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) sets official standards for webpage accessibility.
• WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind): http://www.webaim.org/
  In addition to resources for learning about web accessibility concepts and techniques, this site offers explanations of different areas of disability (visual, hearing, motor control, and cognitive) and how web page design can include or exclude people with these disabilities.
• Bobby page checking service: http://bobby.watchfire.com
  Bobby can test your webpages for missing accessibility features. Automated page testing services like Bobby are most useful when you have already learned the basic principles of web accessibility, so that you can better understand what kinds of problems it can and cannot check.

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