Week Two of Global Accessibility Awareness
May 21st, 2020 was Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)!
Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is a global event that was established to get us talking, thinking and learning about digital accessibility for users with different disabilities. To celebrate GAAD, Student Accessibility Services is encouraging faculty, staff and students to take an hour out of their day to experience accessibility in a different way. Over the next several weeks we will be issuing best practices and challenges for you.
Week 2:
Best Practices: Screen Readers - Reading Order, Headings, Contrast
Screen Readers are used by a diverse array of people. People with vision loss or people with learning disabilities, people who are language learners, and people who favour the auditor learning style. Many people find that Screen Readers are an excellent way to multitask. When creating documents, it is important to note that one of the primary accommodations and technologies is text to speech, or screen readers, and for this technology to work properly things like reading order, headings and formatting are very important.
Remember that in a PowerPoint, slide reading order will appear from bottom to top; meaning that if the title is the first thing in the reading order, it will be read last. Once again, here is a great place to remember to use your accessibility checker.
Screen Reader Challenge: try out a screen reader for the first time, or if you are familiar with the technology already, use it to check some content to see if it was made with the screen reader in mind.
We recommend sites like https://www.nvaccess.org/ where you can download a free screen reader for any operating system. This particular reader was created with low vision and blindness at the forefront of the technology. You can also sign up to access Kurzweil 3000 for free during the pandemic.
Kurzweil 3000 is the text to speech program of choice for SAS. Students with the accommodation of text to speech are using Kurzweil 3000 through our department and if you would like to see what it is all about you can sign up for a free online subscription at https://www.kurzweiledu.com/default.html
If you would like more information about Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) or to see what other institutions are doing worldwide to celebrate, please visit their website at https://globalaccessibilityawarenessday.org/
Thank you for your participation in week 2. Please take a moment to fill out this short Survey. We look forward to your feedback.