Accessibility For All

@LisaBerghoff/@MrKimDHS

Context

Even before the pandemic, we were seeing a steady rise in the amount of educational content and communications becoming digitized and accessible online. Remote learning made online access a necessity which may have exposed some of the weaknesses and holes in how we were uploading our content. As a response, the powers that be signed HB26 last August which quote, "content available on any third party online curriculum that is made available to enrolled students or the public by a school district through the Internet is readily accessible to persons with disabilities." What this means for us is that merely uploading a scanned copy of a PDF online may not be best practice anymore. To ensure equitable access to all members of our community, there are some simple ways to improve the "accessibility score" of any document you upload. So here are a few different considerations when creating online content for not only your students with disabilities but for all of your students.

Screen Readers, Text-to-Speech, and more

Screen readers like Google Read and Write are digital tools students with disabilities can utilize to access information online. In order to make it easier (or even possible) for these screen readers to work, most of us have worked hard to convert our PDFs through a process called OCR or Optical Character Recognition. There are some simple, automatic ways of going through this conversion. Instead of feeding it through expensive OCR machines, cloud storage (mainly Google Drive) can automatically convert text for us. But there are still limitations that OCR, and we can be more specific and conscientious of the content we distribute.

Most Common Accessibility Issues

Here are a few simple ways to make your PDFs more accessible:

• Adding a title 
• This isn't merely naming the file of your PDF. It's establishing an inherent title to the document itself. So if we were using a screen reader, the screen reader could quickly identify the file making it easier to navigate tabs and understand the purpose of PDFs.
• Establishing a language
• While you may think, "well it's typed in English...clearly the language is English...." documents do not explicitly state the language in which they have been created. Screen readers can gain a logistical advantage with a set language for punctuation, pronunciation, and more. 
• Tagging your text
• Sometimes the reading order of text boxes isn't essentially set by the PDF. Which text box makes the most sense to start with? Or to end with? Is there an order that would help the reader understand the information present? It won't always be top to bottom. Tagging your text gives screen readers a set map to follow while reading.
• Alternative Text for Images
• The accessibility gap for visually impaired students regarding images almost goes without saying, but I saw firsthand how difficult it makes students' lives during an AP Government test. The visually impaired student was asked to extrapolate data and information based off of maps, political cartoons, and graphs on a variety of AP questions. Luckily, each image had something called "Alternative Text," which is simply a descriptive paragraph that explains to the reader what exactly the image is attempting to represent. 

Difficult, but doable

• Data Tables and Graphs
• I was amazed and humbled by the lengths at which students with visual impairments had to go to access data on simple graphs and tables. The way they were able to listen to complex information, visualize it internally, and make any sense of the data was astounding. We truly take for granted how easily able-bodied students can extract meaning from data every time they look at an Excel Sheet or simple pie graph. 
• Screen readers can do their best, but we all know reading figures left to right might work for a simple paragraph, but won't necessarily be the correct way to read a data table. When creating content for the visually impaired, it will be up to educators to imagine how to verbalize the data so that it makes sense from their viewpoint. This type of introspection will yield positive dividends not just all of your students, but for the educator as well. 

Conclusion

So you may be thinking, well that's all great but where are the concrete steps to tagging your text, or establishing a language? How do you do that? That information is coming. It depends not only on your productive tool (Word or Adobe PDF), but it also depends on your operating system (macOS, Windows). Those guides are coming with as much specificity and clarity as possible. But to start, we can all benefit from being a little bit more conscientious and attentive and thoughtful of more than just the academic prowess of what we're giving out, but also the manner in which we do.