MSU Faculty Web Accessibility Checklist for Online and Blended Courses

MSU Faculty Web Accessibility Checklist for Online and Blended courses

This checklist is intended to assist faculty teaching using MSU’s ANGEL course management system or other online content host to focus on web accessibility best practices. The checklist will help you assess your content with respect to MSU Web Accessibility Policy http://www.webaccess.msu.edu) requirements. Take a moment to read through the checklist, and mark whether your content is formatted as indicated.

Text Formatting

/
Yes /
No /
Unsure
Text has strong contrast against page background (i.e. dark text on light background). / ___ / ___ / ___
Page headings use heading tags(h1, h2, h3) instead of bolding regular text. See note 1 for more detail. / ___ / ___ / ___
Hyperlinks clearly identified and describe where they are going. (i.e. instead of saying “click here” change links to “click here to visit CNN.com”). / ___ / ___ / ___

Images

All images contain an Alternate (Alt) description tag. See note 2 for more detail. / ___ / ___ / ___
Graphs, charts, vital visual images are clearly described in text body or by using a Long Description tag. / ___ / ___ / ___

Video/Flash

Videos and embedded Flash objects are clearly described in page text. / ___ / ___ / ___
Video contains closed captions (CC) or a script of the narration. / ___ / ___ / ___
If either of the above is not possible, other equal but accessible alternatives are listed (i.e. page in book, other resources) / ___ / ___ / ___

Documents

Original file formats are used when possible (i.e. using an MS Word document instead of a PDF) / ___ / ___ / ___
All PDF files of text are either scanned or converted from original source so text can be copied (i.e. text is OCR scanned). For more detail see Note 3. / ___ / ___ / ___
Files have strong contrast against page background (i.e. dark text on light background). / ___ / ___ / ___
MS Word Files use the proper heading tags rather than regular text that has been bolded. / ___ / ___ / ___

Notes:

1 – What are heading tags and how to I use them in ANGEL?

Heading tags allow you to add structure to a document in a way that allows screen readers to see the structure just as the human eye would. In ANGEL we use the format toolbar as we add page text in order to add heading tags.

2 – What is an ALT tag and how do I use it in ANGEL?

Alt tags alternate text associated with a web page graphic that gets displayed when the Internet user hovers the mouse over the graphic. Alt tags should convey what the graphic is for or about and contain good relevant keywords. Alt tags also make web pages more accessible to the disabled. For example, a vision-impaired user may have a web browser that reads aloud the text and alt tags on a page.

3 – What is OCR and how do I do it?

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the recognition of printed or written text characters by a computer. This involves analysis of the scanned image and then translation of the character image into text characters.

Adobe Acrobat Standard and Professional provide OCR tools.