Technology Center

Guide to Technology Accessibility

As we face increased reliance on remote learning, we need to be equally sensitive to accessibility of our shared contents. As a way to support this need, our team is ready to provide guidance and remediation support for documents and other media used in your teaching. Our team is ready to help you to fix your documents for accessibility. To access this expanded service, you can use our traditional ticketing system, email to let us talk about your needs.

If you were not aware the state of WA has issued new policy (Policy 188 – Accessibility).  This policy establishes the expectation for state agencies that people with disabilities have access to and use of information and data and be provided access to the same services and content that is available to persons without disabilities unless providing direct access is not possible due to technical or legal limitations. There are federal policy’s that mirror the state policy. Designing your digital tools and resources with accessibility in mind is best practice and a win for everyone.

What should I do?

A good first step would be an environmental scan.  What vendors, sites, tools do you use and are they compliant. Once that’s done, work to establish some guidelines around accessibility and educate your teams.   Spelling out the requirements might take the form of a modification to your style guides, purchasing requirements and/or employee handbooks.  Looping in folks publishing content, purchasing or developing tools are key in working towards accessibility.

Where can I learn more?

Videos

UW-Creating Accessible Videos

See if you qualify for the UW Free Captioning Project here.

MS Office Documents

Microsoft Office provides and accessibility checker for Office documents (.docx, pptx, .xlsx).

UW has prepared several resources to help you writing accessible documents:

PDF

Adobe Acrobat Pro provides an accessibility checker for PDF documents. Learn more about it here.

UW Accessibility has also prepared some guidelines:

Webpages

Webpages can be checked with the WAVE tool. To use WAVE, click here and enter the URL for the webpage you want to check.