Web Accessibility

Essentially, for students, online accessibility means that there are services in place to ensure they have assistance when they need it and content can be accessed in multiple formats, whether students view the Internet in the traditional ways or through use of assistive technologies, such as a screen reader or a braille-reader. It may also mean that, based on their disability, students may require increased access to content or assessments, such as extensions on time allotted, etc.

For instructors, online accessibility can feel a little overwhelming. It means formatting all digital instructional content with accessibility in mind. For instance, a video is a great resource, but if it does not include closed captions (or if it does, but the captions are not accurate), then it isn’t accessible for all users, such as those with hearing impairments. A document may have great information for your students, but if it isn’t formatted with a proper heading structure, students with visual impairments using a screen reader will be unable to navigate it as easily.

The good news is that KSU has many resources to help. One such resource, Digital Learning Innovations (DLI) is an entire department devoted to assisting faculty with online instruction—and we specialize in online accessibility support. One way we’ve tried to help is to break down the WCAG standards above into a simple formula that can help make accessibility accessible for you called the Basic Four of Online Accessibility. 

Another, Ally, is integrated within D2L and checks your documents for accessibility issues, providing instruction on how to fix major issues. Ally can also create multiple formats for your documents that students can download. Links to other resources are included below.

Lastly, a three-week training workshop from DLI called Acessible Teaching Essentials is available to faculty. 

If you work in an academic or staff department at KSU and manage that department's public-facing web pages (such as this one), you have a responsibility when it comes to accessibility as well. Because students, potential students, and those outside of the university access the KSU website for vital information, it is essential that our public-facing content is as accessible to all users as we can make it. Furthermore, it is USG policy and the law that our public content does not discriminate against any users. 

As stated above, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines provide the basis for our understanding of web accessibility. However, much of what is outlined there has to do with the configuration of our website and is managed by the UITS web team which works hard to maintain that compliance. For that reason, we recommend that web creators focus on the following areas:

1. Ensure web page content is properly formatted to be optimized for use with assistive technology: appropriate heading structure is used, images have proper alternative text, etc.
2. Ensure downloadable resources such as Word documents and PDFs are properly formatted and/or tagged.
3. Ensure all media is properly formatted for accessibility. This includes captions or audio descriptions for video and audio files and that complex interactive resources have a text alternative.

For web editors, DLI's Basic Four webpage is an ideal resource to begin to explore web accessibility. In the Spring of 2024, DLI will also be rolling out a new asynchronous training workshop for web editors called Accessible Web Essentials. We will provide updates as it is ready.