Accessibility Technology Initiative
(Course Materials Workshop)

Chris Pollett

cpollett@gmail.com

Apr 16, 2010.

Agenda

I am Chris Pollett, the Faculty-in-Residence for the Accessible Technology Initiative for the College of Science.
The Accessible Technology Initiative (ATI) came about because of Calstate Coded Memoranda AA-2007-04-PDF which requires that all administrative and instructional materials be made accessible by 2012.
At SJSU, all new greensheets are supposed to be accessible beginning Fall 2008.
Today, we are going to talk about what is needed to make greensheets and other course materials accessible.
If you have questions on this initiative you want me to try to answer after I am gone, please feel free to contact me at: chris@pollett.org.
I also have a website on the ATI on which you can find these slides:
http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/pollett/accessibility/.

In addition to myself, the College of Science has one student-in-residence (SIR) who has been trained in how to make Word, PowerPoint, PDF documents accessible.
For the College of Science, the SIR also knows HTML.
Faculty and staff can send documents they would like to have converted to the FIR either by e-mail or snail mail and they will be forwarded to the student.
If a reasonable due date, reasonable document, and reasonable instructions are given, the student will make the document accessible return it to the FIR, and thence onto the faculty member.
If someone asks you to make a document accessible and you don't know how to do it, feel free to forward the document along to me, and I'll try to get the SIR to look at it.

The Center for Faculty Development has created an Accessible Greensheet Template-DOC.
You can download it and modify it to your class and you should be close to having an accessible greensheet.
You just need to make sure that the stuff you fill in is accessible.
If you prefer HTML greensheets, you can use the CS Department's Syllabus Template, which is also accessible.

I'd like to now briefly describe what kinds of things you should keep in mind when making your greensheet and or other course materials accessible.
The Center for Faculty Development regularly schedules workshops on how to make Word, PowerPoint, and PDF documents accessible.
The next few slides give general things to watch for split according to part of the document:
- Heading of sections
- Images
- Tables
- Lists
- Links
- Text

Scanned documents have been optically character recognized and the results proofread.
Headings in the document are properly nested. Level 1 then level 2 then level 3; don't skip heading levels.
Headings should be used rather than changing font-size as screen-readers use these to generate table of contents
All instructional images either have alternative text or captions
If you have are trying to think of alternative text for some complicated image, ask yourself if I was search for this image on Google what would I search on?

Tables should have captions in Word or Powerpoint; in HTML, you should use the summary attribute.
Repeat table headings if there is a page break.
Beware of nested tables as the reading order of screen readers will often be confused.
If you are listing items, for some visual impairments the list is very confusing if it is all on one line: Use a vertical list.

Link text should be descriptive of where the link goes: Not "click me."
For documents which may be printed have the link text be the actual url.
Between hypertext links you should have at least one character that is not a hypertext link.
Links should warn people if they go off site/document, or if they will require a plug-in to use. For example, the link text might end with: -offsite ; or -PDF; or -PPT; etc.

Text versus background should have sufficient contrast.
A reading flow between text boxes has been set up. (If you only have one text box, this is not a problem.)
Beware of character encodings: If possible always choose utf-8 for the web.
Ligatures sometimes confuse screen readers.

The previous slides have many things to remember to do in order to make your documents accessible.
The Accessible Techonology Initiative Committee for SJSU has been working on standard criteria for evaluating the accessibility of documents based on document type.
I would like to mention these now to summarize the most important things to watch for and to emphasize the main things you should be doing for your documents.
Remember once you have made one document accessible, you can re-use what you have done to make other future documents accessible.