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The quantity and quality of online content is ever-increasing in most areas, including education. Taking extra steps to ensure your website and webpages are accessible, as the tip sheet from AccessATE and NCAM describes, can make your content stand out, and get it used more often by more people.

Tip sheet: Creating Accessible Websites

You may recognize that a number of the accessibility considerations for websites are the same as those important for other media – good color contrast, using headings, providing alternative text for images, avoiding complex tables, and so on. Here, we will discuss some additional recommendations when designing an accessible website.

Forms are a frequent feature on many websites – perhaps you need your users to sign up for a webinar, or request some information or an item, or upload materials or resources. A key thing to remember when designing forms is that everything must be as clear and explicit as possible. Buttons, labels, next steps, consequences of actions, etc., should never be vague or leave your users wondering what will happen once they click. For users with low vision or motor control issues, clickable areas should be made fairly...

A woman editing a video on a computer

We use videos in so many ways in the ATE community; as part of classroom and lab instruction, for recruiting students, and as part of our outreach efforts to various stakeholders. And as we all use Zoom and other online platforms for meetings and conferences, we often record those events, creating more recorded video content. So how do we ensure that everyone can utilize this great content? By considering accessibility from the beginning, which is what this helpful tip sheet from the National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) and AccessATE is all about!

Tip Sheet:  Creating Accessible Videos

The tip sheet covers a number of different categories that relate to making video accessible. For those who are deaf or hard of hearing, captioning is critical, and it’s also very useful for many users for whom English is not their first language. For blind users, audio descriptions can be critical – particularly when you think about portions of a video set in STEM or lab settings where people are demoing or doing technical work.

Sometimes it’s easier to see something in action rather than read about it. A quick and effective example of the impact of captioning is to watch the...