Putting digital accessibility into practice this spring

With the initial April 24 deadline looming for compliance with federal digital accessibility mandates, Rich Tener and Paola Sepulveda, IT services, are on a spring tour to remind as many campus audiences as possible. They stopped at the March 5 Professional and Scientific Council meeting. Tener serves as chief information security officer, which includes digital accessibility, and Sepulveda is a member of the digital accessibility team.

Tener reminded council members that the university doesn't have a budget to centrally coordinate compliance for the whole university. The task of confirming accessibility and remediating content, as needed, will fall to those who create or manage it (if you weren't the creator) -- or many, many faculty and staff, he said. 

He also noted that, given the enormous volume of university digital materials, the likelihood of 100% accessibility is low. Instead, employees should use the following prioritization list to focus their efforts this spring on what matters the most:

1. Publicly accessible and high-traffic websites (for example, ISU homepage, admissions, university human resources)
2. Course materials for students
3. University communications
4. Discipline- or program-specific problems (for example, math equations or PowerPoint decks containing images unique to the discipline)

Tener said communities of practice, containing IT specialists and faculty experts, will be organized in departments and colleges to tackle some of the discipline-specific challenges and share the solutions they develop.

Just getting started? Do this

For employees who've procrastinated on their role in this campuswide effort, it's not too late to get the job done. If you're just getting started, Tener recommended three actions:

1. Complete the core digital accessibility training: Separate 90-minute sessions exist for faculty and staff in Workday Learning.
2. Familiarize yourself with these primary tools for checking the accessibility of your work:
   The apps in Microsoft 365 (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook) all have a built-in checker to spot accessibility errors and suggest improvements.
   In Canvas: Anthology Ally checks course content and files for accessibility and generates a course accessibility report that includes guidance for improvements.
   Request access to Siteimprove for your ISU website to assess its accessibility. Sites typically are added within 48 business hours, and the crawler takes a few days to finish its initial analysis and identify any problems. Subsequently, you receive weekly reports on your website's accessibility.
3. Practice accessibility steps (below) as you create new materials going forward.

New and old materials

Tener said the accessibility requirement applies not just to new digital materials, but previous materials that remain available to the public or receive frequent updates. He provided these tips for creating accessible documents and other materials:

• Use built-in headline and text styles, instead of boosting font size or bolding text.
• Use the built-in tools for bulleted or numbered lists.
• Use descriptive words in your links; avoid "click here."
• Select high-contrasting color for text and its background. Avoid using color to convey importance.
• Add alternative text for images. Mark images "decorative" if they're not essential to the content or message.
• Link to external or third-party sites that also comply with accessibility guidelines.
• Include captions or a transcript in all audio and video materials (and correct any errors in the auto-generated first version. Discipline-specific vocabulary frequently is misinterpreted.)
• Use the "header row" style in all tables. Avoid using no-border, "invisible" tables.