Become Accessible
For National AccessAbility Week and Red Shirt Day Student Accessibility Services is sharing resources and information about accessibility with the Lakehead University community. Accessibility is a shared responsibility that each of us can contribute to every day.
Sample Red Shirt Day Pledges
Accessibility in Your Every Day Life
Below you will find examples of accessibility tools that you may already be using in your own life, or ones you may not have considered!
Digital accessibility in social media – alternative text for images (describe what you are posting in an alt text for a picture so that people who have visual disabilities can hear what you are seeing. (how to make Instagram, Facebook, TikTok more accessible)
Android and Mac – everyone, well almost everyone has a smartphone or tablet these days but were you aware that there is accessibility built into all of them? Go to settings and find your accessibility menu. Ever wonder what it would be like to navigate your home screen without looking at it? Try Voice Over. Hey Google, read that text from (so and so), Wanna get really geeky about it ‘hey Siri - Lumos!’ It will turn on your flashlight. You just activated an accessibility feature - the virtual assistant. Try it on your smart TV, or if you’re on a computer, check your settings there are all kinds of accessibility features built in. In Windows 10 you’ll find it under ‘Ease of Access’ for Mac ‘Accessibility’ across the board. You’ll be so surprised what digital accessibility really looks like.
Want to try talking to your computer without actually using your keyboard or mouse at all? Head on over to Lipsurf.com. Lipsurf is a chrome extension that will allow you to surf your favourite websites completely hands free. Other great Chrome extension include Voice Typing. Use it in Google Docs and dictate into your computer. Making notes, brainstorming a paper, why not talk it out? Office 365 has dictation as well.
NVDA – Stop for a moment and think about what it would mean if you couldn’t see the screen you’re looking at right now. How would you access all that digital content? How would you know how to navigate your desktop? You can try it out with https://www.nvaccess.org/ NVDA was developed by two blind best friends for people with visual disabilities. It is a free downloadable screen reader. How does it work? Using your mouse or keyboard commands, you can navigate through your desktop without ‘seeing’ it. The automated voice will tell you where you are and what you click on.
Do you prefer digital books and the portability of a tablet or a Kindle, to a real book? Don’t worry, we’re not judging you! Do you prefer to hear an audio book over reading it? Or do you find yourself reaching for something like Speechify to scan your book and then read it for you? This digital access to books was created out of a need for people with print and vision disabilities, but it also helps with focus, triggering different learning styles and making access to written material so much broader than just picking up a book that may not be as accessible as you think. Try Speechify for free!
Did you know that closed captions aren’t just for people with hearing disabilities? No really, it’s true. Closed captioning is helpful for so many kinds of people and for many reasons. Maybe your first language isn’t English but you find that when you can read along, you retain more content. For people who are easily distracted, captions help focus because they are constantly moving and changing, and this stimulates your brain. Even people who can’t find an environment quiet enough to hear what is going on , but you can read the captions! Closed captioning is available in both Zoom and Google Meetings. Just go to in meeting settings and active. If you are the host of the meeting, you are making your content accessible to so many more people.
Digital Accessibility doesn’t just mean computers, phones, or tablets. Digital media could also mean anything that digitizes, this includes smart pens like the Molskien recording pen – literally it records what is happening in the audio environment and you can still use it as an actual pen. Or what about a scanning pen like a scan marker or a E-Pen. It has a camera in it to scan text and then read it aloud to you.
Additional Resources
Rick Hansen Foundation on Access Ability Week