This document provides an overview of accessibility for online courses and documents. It discusses legal and ethical obligations to make courses accessible to all learners, including those with disabilities. Specific types of disabilities that should be accommodated include visual impairments, physical disabilities, learning disabilities, deafness or hard of hearing, and color blindness. Guidelines for accessibility include the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Section 508 compliance. The document provides tips for making Word documents, videos, images, PDFs, and websites accessible and includes resources for checking accessibility.

1. Accessibility
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2. Overview
 Legal and ethical obligations
 Courses “fully accessible to all learners,
including those with disabilities”
 Courses must be accessible whether or not
students with disabilities are enrolled
 Hard of hearing, visually impaired, learning
disabilities, physical disabilities, color blindness
 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0
(World Wide Web Consortium)
 Accessibility Law: Section 508
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3. MS Word and user’s experience
using JAWS
https://youtu.be/D8XFkGMF0sw
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4. Video
 Closed captioning, good for
 deaf or hard of hearing
 second-language students
 reinforces spelling and pronunciation learning
 helps students search for content
 transcript production
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5. Images
 Choosing and using accessible images
 Use text descriptions, referred to often as
“alternative text” or “alt text” in authoring tools
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6. PDF
 Adobe Acrobat Pro has an accessibility
checker tool (Tools > Accessibility)
 For untagged PDF Documents, add tags and
adjust read order
 Keep Acrobat Pro updated to latest version
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7. MS Office Word
 In Microsoft Office Word, use the Accessibility
Checker tool to find issues that are easily fixed
 Use styles. Identify headers, lists, quotes, etc.
 Include a table of contents with links to section
headings
 Identify column headers for tables in Word (under
Table Properties > Row > Repeat as Header Row)
 Add alt text to embedded images (Word 2010: right
click, format image, select “Alt Text”)
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8. Making Websites
 Content management systems such as
Wordpress: choose an accessible theme
 Validate pages using the World Wide Web
Consortium’s (W3C) HTML and CSS
validators: http://validator.w3.org/ and
https://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
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9. Checking web pages
 Wave Accessibility Evaluation Tool:
http://wave.webaim.org/
 AChecker: http://achecker.ca
 If possible, recruit assistive technology users
and/or experts to test your pages for
accessibility problems.
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10. Services at UH
 UH has consulting services: CDS Media
Center, http://www.media.cds.hawaii.edu
 http://www.media.cds.hawaii.edu/publications/
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11. References
 Rems. T. 2014. Authoring Accessible Documents.
Presentation to Center on Disability Studies, UH
Manoa. Accessed January 2016.
 Rems, T. 2015. Introduction to Accessibility for
Websites, Multimedia and Print. Presentation to
Fall 2015 OER C4ward, Kapiolani Community
College.
 Open Washington. 2015. OER Training Module 8:
Accessibility. http://www.openwa.org/module-8/.
Accessed March 31, 2016.
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