Accessibility from the Ground Up: Without Glasses, You Couldn’t Read This Content

Most people think of blindness as theonly visual disability, but limited vision can also make access to eLearningand other online content challenging. Reduced vision may worsen with age, andit can affect anyone. This article addresses visual disabilities, which areincluded in the “P” of POUR (discussed in “Accessibility from the Ground Up: Build Captions and Usable Design Into All eLearning”)—contentthat is perceivable to learners’senses.

“In our society, lots and lots ofpeople wear glasses. A lot of those people, without their glasses, wouldn’t beable to function. But they don’t think of themselves as people withdisabilities because glasses are ubiquitous,” said Dmitri Belser, executivedirector of the Center for Accessible Technology (C for AT) in Berkeley, California.

A person who is legally blind couldnot read 12-point type on a computer screen; neither could many adults who usereading glasses. They’d also have difficulty reading text in colors with poorcontrast. About eight percent of men (and significantly fewer women) experiencesome form of color blindness, a reduced ability to distinguish shades of some colors, makingtext in some color combinations unreadable. But, as Belser points out, manylearners who have visual limitations do not consider themselves “disabled.”

WCAG 2.0 guidelines include providingalternatives to text, describing non-text items, allowing learners to control theappearance—size, color, contrast—of text, and using colors that offersufficient contrast. (Designers can use free online tools to check color contrast.) Theseelements of universal design are helpful to any learner who has even a mildvisual limitation.

To meet WCAG Level A guidelines,eLearning designers must use visual clues other than or in addition to color tosignify differences. Rather than red and green circles, for example, designerscould use a green check mark and a red octagon (stop-sign shape) to signalcorrect and incorrect choices; they could use different colors and differentline styles, such as dots and dashes, to show different subway routes or linesin a chart.

Seeing beyond color

Perception of eLearning contentgoes deeper than color. For people who cannot read a screen, voice recognitionand screen readers are essential. These technologies, until recently bothexpensive and terrible according to Belser, have become mainstream: Who hasn’tencountered tools like Siri? Like captioning, these were created to accommodatedisabilities but are now used to improve everyone’s user experience.

Most phones and recent-modelcomputers have screen-reading technology built in: VoiceOver (iPhonesand Macs), Narrator (Windows10), and TalkBack(Android). Free or low-cost apps, such as NVDA (Windows)and ChromeVox (Chrome browsers), maketext instantly accessible to millions of people.

But there’s more to a website thantext. Learners who are blind or low-vision need an alternative to visualimages. Specialized screen readers, like VoiceOver and NVDA, look beyond theobvious text on a web page. They seek out what is called “alt text”—descriptionsof images that are coded into online content. But for the screen readers toread those descriptions, eLearning developers need to create them. Including alt-textdescriptions is part of AA-level WCAG 2.0 compliance.

For many images, the descriptor isa simple tag—small white dog, smiling woman—but for complex diagrams you need adetailed description. Including descriptions of tables, charts, and compleximages in the text provided to all learners improves everyone’s experience;linking to a text description is also an option. In videos, a separate descriptiontrack complements the audio track, and all onscreen text appears inhigh-contrast colors. To see how this looks in practice, watch this fully accessible video that Helen Walsh, an accessible media consultant and executivedirector of Diverse Disability Media, created to mark the ADA’s 25^thanniversary.

Most social mediaplatforms—Twitter, for example—support alt text, Walsh says. So do manyeLearning authoring tools. But most users don’t know it’s there; if theyhaven’t turned the feature on, they won’t be offered the option to enter alttext when creating eLearning. “Retrofitting” to add alt text later is complicatedand expensive.

Navigation challenges for low-vision learners

A barrier that might not be obviousto sighted computer users is navigation: Blind and low-vision learners cannotsee a cursor or pointer, making it impossible to use a mouse or trackpad. Keyboardcontrols that rely on color or highlighting to show cursor location are nobetter.

An alternative input method isessential. Screen readers and other assistive technologies usually work with akeyboard or mimic keystrokes to navigate around and between screens. Using the tabkey to move from link to link, text block to text block, or page to page iscommon. Therefore, developers must ensure that all content is operable using akeyboard.

• Text and headings must have accurate HTML5 coding
• Text, particularly tables, must be formatted sothat it can be read in sequential blocks
• Tables should have summaries or textdescriptions, since it can be difficult for learners to understand the contextor relationships between the content of different table cells
• Hyperlink text should convey meaning (for tips, see:Ten Ways to Create Useful Hyperlinks)

A better user experience

Many of the guidelines foraccessibility add up to good, usable design.

“It’s amazing to me how manydesigners use pale blue text on a blue background. There are standards for whatcolor contrast can be, but we always tell people to go beyond the standard;really make it better,” Belser said. “Yes, as a blind person, that will make iteasier for me to read. But almost everyone wants it easier to read. Do youreally want people to have to struggle to read your website?”

References

Bigman, Alex. “Why all designers need to understand colorblindness.” 99designs. 17 April 2013.
https://99designs.com.sg/blog/tips/designers-need-to-understand-color-blindness/

Caldwell, Ben, Michael Cooper, Loretta Guarino Reid, andGregg Vanderheiden (eds.). “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.”World Wide Web Consortium. 11 December 2008.
https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/

Hogle, Pamela. “Ten Ways to Create Useful Hyperlinks.” Learning Solutions Magazine. 6 September2016.
https://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/2034/?utm_campaign=lsmag&utm_medium=link&utm_source=lsmag