Hey folks! Long time no post! We’ve been really busy at the Help Desk with doing accessibility checks these last few weeks in preparation for changes to ADA Title II. What is ADA Title II, you may ask? Well, here is a quick run-down of ADA Title II changes if you want more details, but in short: The University has to make all of digital materials accessible to disabled persons. In a web format, much of this takes the form of making sure that everything is formatted properly so a screen reader can intelligibly read it to a user.
There are a lot of things to consider, and while they’re pretty intuitive once you understand how a screen reader works, it’s a bit out of the scope of this blog post to go over all of the details, what we will do today is show you how to use accessibility checkers!
What is an Accessibility Checker?
It’s a program included in an application that runs a quick AI-driven check for accessibility concerns. They are easy to find and easier to use, but it should be noted that like everything automated, a human should double-check manually. Certain things just can’t be picked up by a machine. For example: Alt Text! (to be explained later)
How do I use it?
We’ll only go over accessibility checks for Microsoft products today. There are programs in Adobe Acrobat Reader for PDFs, but PDFs are a nightmare to check anyways, so we’re just not going to worry about that now.
Where do I find it?
So, for both PowerPoint and Word the Accessibility Check can be found under Review. Pretty straightforward, all things considered. Once you click on it, you’ll have an Accessibility Check bar show up on the righthand side of your screen. It will show you what accessibility concerns it’s found and, perhaps best of all, will give you a brief description of just why it’s a problem! You can keep it running while you work and dismiss the sidebar at any time to check later. It’s a great tool to not only check accessibility in general, but also to educate yourself about it!
That’s all for this week. Accessibility is a huge task that’s quickly become the theme of our semester here, so expect more of these posts as a sort of series in the near future!