Accessiblity

Issues, Assistance and Guidelines
General Principles for the World Wide Web
General Principles for course content on MyUni
PDF documents
Multimedia
Checklist for MyUni content
Further Information and Tools

This resource has been designed for use by lecturers, tutors, facilitators and trainers at the University of Adelaide where the online learning management system MyUni has been implemented. The information may also be relevant for other educational institutions and/or serve as the basis of a model for implementation.

Issues, Assistance and Guidelines

Accessibility is becoming an increasingly important issue as more educational content, communications and services become available online. This information has been designed to help in an understanding of the basic principles of accessibility with online material. General web authoring guidelines are provided along with specific information on MyUni, PDF (portable document format) and Multimedia.

What are the issues?

Not all students who enrol at the University will declare a visual impairment or other form of disability. It is our responsibility to ensure that teaching practices comply as much as possible with accessibility guidelines regardless of whether there are students known to have a disability in a course. The same principle applies to any other service provided to students across the University.

Help and assistance

If you need assistance with any issues regarding accessibility and MyUni you should contact the Centre for Learning and Professional Development.

The Disability Liaison Officer (DLO) can also assist on a range of matters. The DLO can arrange for alternative sources of material to be obtained for students. One issue that staff should be aware of is that there may be significant turnaround time associated with these activities. For example, any graphs in course material that need to be tactiled by the Royal Society of the Blind will incur a two week turnaround. This may affect assessment deadlines for students.

The MyUni Helpdesk (8303 3335, myuni.help@adelaide.edu.au) provides assistance to staff with the conversion of documents into PDF.

General Principles for the World Wide Web

The linked summary guidelines are based on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C’s) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and are intended to provide high level guidance. For more detail on how to meet the guidelines please refer to the W3C’s guidelines that break down accessibility into three priority areas and include considerable technical detail for web developers.

General Course Content Principles for MyUni

MyUni provides a framework for online delivery of content related to education. When you are placing content into MyUni as an instructor, as well as considering all of the general guidelines given within Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Summary, the attached General Course Content Principles should be followed wherever possible.

PDF documents

Adobe PDF is a common file type used for placing documents on the web because it is a universal file format that preserves the exact look and feel of any source document. However, the way in which source documents are written and options used during the conversion process to PDF can have a major impact on the accessibility of the final PDF placed on the web.

PDF is one of the most common file types on MyUni and has been encouraged as an appropriate file format because of file size efficiencies (that reduce download time) and the cross platform support available for desktops. PDF documents currently (July 2003) comprise 35% of the total document space on the MyUni application server.

Although size efficiencies and cross platform support contribute to increased accessibility, for visually impaired students PDF is the most inaccessible file format.

The issues for visually impaired students are caused by:

• PDF documents created as images are unreadable by the JAWS screen reader.
• The JAWS screen reader behaves inconsistently with PDF documents.
• Text from PDF documents created as images cannot be cut and paste into other desktop applications (such as Microsoft Word) for use with a screen reader.

Students need to be able to both read and manipulate text within an online document for use in assessments.

The linked guidelines should be followed for preparing documents that will be converted to PDF.

Multimedia

This is a quick list of things to be aware of if you are incorporating multimedia into online content:

To access multimedia requires an appropriate plugin for a web browser and/or software on the client desktop. Check that the content you wish to use performs with plugins available on the standard University desktop environment and in student labs. You should also provide instructions to users about where they can source the software to install on their computers at home.

• Make sure that the size of multimedia files does not make it prohibitive for students to access them from home or off-campus. Consider making the files available on CD to students and linking to the CD content from applications such as MyUni.
• Every web server is configured to support a set of standard file types. You may need to check with the people that provide technical support for MyUni or your web server that the web server is configured to understand the type of media file that you are using within your site.
• Make sure that you provide text or other alternatives to users who may not be able to access this content.

Checklist for MyUni content

Further Information and Tools

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C’s) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (http://www.w3.org/WAI/)

Dreamweaver Accessibility (http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/accessibility/mx/dw/)

Bobby Online Software Tool (http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp)

JAWS (http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_products/software_jaws.asp)

Adobe Accessibility (http://access.adobe.com/)

Another useful website to visit is Web Accessibility at http://www.csufresno.edu/webaccess and in particular Web Accessibility Learning Modules at http://www.csufresno.edu/webaccess/learningmodules/howtouse/

Also http://www.techdis.ac.uk which includes an accessibility and usability resource at http://www.techdis.ac.uk/seven/ . This site, amongst other things, discusses blind users, visual and hearing impairment, physical disabilities, cognitive difficulties, reading and dyslexia difficulties.

This document is available for download 'Content Accessibility and MyUni: a brief guide'.