Access to Electronic Resources

Development of sophisticated multimedia electronic and World Wide Web resources has extended the reach of computers. Increasingly, however, these resources are not fully accessible to people with some types of disabilities. For example, screen reader software with a speech synthesizer used by a student who is blind cannot interpret graphics or video clips.

Background

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 requires that U.S. programs and services be accessible to individuals with disabilities. A 1996 Department of Justice ruling (http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/foia/cltr204.txt) makes it clear that ADA accessibility requirements apply to Internet resources.

Some students with visual impairments cannot see graphics, and some students who are deaf cannot hear audio. Some have difficulty when screens are unorganized, inconsistent, and cluttered and when descriptions and instructions are unclear. These difficulties may occur for students who have learning disabilities, speak English as a second language, or are poor readers. Other students use older equipment or slow connections or modems that limit their access to multimedia features.

As more information is delivered via computer and network technologies, schools play an increasingly important role in ensuring access to electronic information resources for all students. When evaluating the accessibility of a school's electronic resources, consider tutorials, application software, online catalogs, electronic indexes, and full-text resources such as encyclopedias, and websites.

Electronic resources designed or developed in-house, such as school and district web pages, online catalogs, and local digital library projects, should be developed with universal access as a goal. Accessibility guidelines should be incorporated into web development standards.

Consider accessibility when purchasing new electronic resources for the school. Ask the vendor if the product has been tested for accessibility and, specifically, if the product is compatible with screen reading software. Develop a policy that electronic products in your school be reviewed for accessibility before purchase. Make it a priority to buy and develop accessible resources. Then, as a backup, be prepared to assist students to access electronic resources that they cannot access independently.

Universal Design Principles

In developing accessible electronic resources, principles of universal design should be employed. This approach will help ensure that all students will be able to independently utilize your electronic resources, regardless of their disabilities or the limitations of their equipment and software.

Typically, organizations design their electronic services for the average user. Universal design means that they are designed for people with a broad range of abilities and disabilities. The National Center on Universal Design has defined universal design as "the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design."

Universal design principles can be applied to both facilities and tools. They are especially appropriate to consider when designing electronic resources, including online catalogs, educational software, and web resources. Adapted from a listing by the Trace Research and Development Center (http://www.trace.wisc.edu/), here are some general guidelines to consider in designing an electronic resource.

Accessibility Guidelines

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops and maintains the protocols used on the web to insure interoperability to promote universal access. W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has proposed guidelines for all web authors. As Tim Berners-Lee, director of W3C, puts it, "The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."

In 2001, as a response to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, the U.S. Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board (Access Board) developed accessibility standards for information technology developed, procured, or used by federal agencies. The list of guidelines for accessibility provides a good model even for organizations that are not required to comply.

In most school districts, many people develop web content. Building web content that is consistent, accessible, and usable can be a challenge. To ensure school-wide development of accessible web pages, consider adopting standards or guidelines that are useful and well explained. This may be as complex as constructing a set of guidelines from scratch or as simple as adopting the Section 508 web accessibility standards. Disseminate information about the standards to all web page developers in the district, and provide resources, training, and technical support on an ongoing basis.

Accessible Web Design

In this section, we'll apply universal design principles to a common activity in schools today; designing web pages. The World Wide Web has rapidly become the most popular Internet resource, combining hypertext and multimedia to provide a huge network of educational, governmental, and commercial resources. Many schools now maintain their own websites. Yet because of the multimedia nature of the medium, many Internet surfers cannot access some materials available on the web.

View the video, World Wide Access: Accessible Web Design, in which students with disabilities share access problems and solutions. Examples of design features for making web pages accessible are described. These recommendations are covered in the handout World Wide Access: Accessible Web Design. Read this publication for more accessible design examples. If you have not created a web page before, you may be confused by some of the technical jargon used in the video and handout. If so, don't be discouraged. Focus on the basic principles, and pass the information on to staff, students, and administrators responsible for web page development at your school.

We'll start out with principles related to general page design. The first principle to remember is to maintain a simple, consistent page layout throughout your site. Much of the power and appeal of the web comes from the fact that it presents information in a variety of formats while also organizing that information through hypertext links. Designing a well-organized site with a consistent design makes it easier for visitors to find the information they need. Following this guideline will especially assist people with learning disabilities who have difficulty following disorganized presentations.

Think about the physical effort needed to use your site. Remember that small buttons marking links can be difficult targets for visitors with mobility impairments that result in restricted hand movements. Larger buttons make it easier for all visitors to select the links on your page. Along with a consistent page layout, it is important to keep backgrounds simple and make sure there is enough contrast.

People with low vision or color blindness or those using black-and-white monitors can have difficulty reading information at sites with busy backgrounds and dark colors. Many background images and colors obscure text and make reading difficult. Make sure that there is enough contrast between your text and the background of the page. Choose background, text, and link colors carefully, and always test your site with a variety of browsers and monitors. Following this guideline will aid visitors with low vision and those with learning disabilities who can find busy backgrounds and moving features from page to page confusing.

Visitors who use screen-reading software can adjust their software to read only the links on a page. For this reason, links should provide enough information when read out of context. For example, never use "Click here" as a link or next to a graphic used as a link. Make links descriptive enough that they are understood out of context.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the standardized code used to create websites. The code works with tags that tell a web browser where to find and how to display your information. HTML was designed to be a universal format outside the bounds of proprietary software and computer languages. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifies what is standard HTML, with the intent of maintaining a language compatible with many platforms and browsers.

The universal format of the World Wide Web meets the equitable and flexible principles of universal design. However, many people like to use new and nonstandard features to add flash to their web pages. This obstructs the original purpose of a worldwide standard and the open communication that it allows and encourages.

Using standard HTML tags will ensure that your content can be accessed by all browsers used by visitors to your site. Avoid tags such as <blink> that are not supported by all web browsers. Frame tags are another example of nonstandard tags. Frames often present logistical nightmares to text-based screen reading software. Evaluate whether frames are truly necessary at your site. When you use nonstandard tags, you are likely blocking someone from your information.

Notify site visitors that you are concerned about accessibility by including a statement about accessibility on your page. Encourage site visitors to notify you with their accessibility concerns. For example, the DO-IT home page includes this statement:

Graphical Features

People who are blind cannot view the graphical features of your website. Many people with visual impairments use voice output programs with text-based browsers (such as Lynx) or graphical browsers with the feature that loads images turned off. Include text alternatives to make the content in these graphical features accessible. This addresses the universal design principle of redundant presentation of information in different modes.

Some people have advocated the use of alternative text versions of websites that are graphic-intensive. However, this adds a great deal of maintenance time and complexity, since two versions must be updated. The maintenance time increases exponentially for organizations that provide their sites in multiple language versions. Make every effort to create the original version in an accessible format. Remember, the first principle of universal access is equitable use, so avoid segregating users of your electronic resources by their ability, the connection speed, or the type of hardware and software they use. Below are guidelines for providing alternative text for various types of visual features.

To start out, include short, descriptive "alt" attributes for graphical features on your page. An "alt" attribute is an HTML parameter used with the <img> element to provide a text alternative to graphical content. With alternate text, users who can't see the graphics (e.g., screen reader users, text browser users, sighted users with images turned off) can still access the content.

The bold text in the following example of HTML code shows what an "alt" attribute looks like. An "alt" attribute always works within an image or graphical HTML tag.

<html>
<head>
<title>DO-IT Program</title></head>
<body>
<img src="doitlogo.gif" alt="[DO-IT LOGO]">
<h1>DO-IT at the University of Washington</h1>

In some cases where a graphic provides no additional information, the "alt" attribute can be used with a null value ("") to eliminate clutter. The "alt" attributes for graphical bullets can simply be asterisks.

For example, when a sighted visitor views the DO-IT home page at http://www.washington.edu/doit/ with a graphical browser, he will see the DO-IT logo.

When a user who is blind visits, his voice output program will read [DO-IT LOGO] because DO-IT staff used this text as an "alt" attribute for the graphic. This gives him a clear idea of what is on the page. In addition, any visitor coming to the site using a text-based browser will understand that there is a logo there instead of the more ambiguous "image" that is the default result when no "alt" attribute is used. Because browsers sometimes have difficulty with long "alt" attributes, these should be short and simple (less than five words).

This example can also be used to explain the difference between text and words embedded in a graphic. Web designers sometimes embed text in graphics so that they can incorporate color, fancy fonts, and other design elements into the display. It is important to differentiate between text, which screen readers can access, and words that are images, which screen readers cannot read. In the DO-IT logo, "DO-IT" is a graphic image. DO-IT staff include "DO-IT" in the "alt" attribute so that the DO-IT name is displayed by a text browser and thus read by a speech synthesizer.

A related accessible design rule is to use menu alternatives for image maps to ensure that the embedded links are accessible. An image map is a picture on which areas can be clicked to find a link to another page. For example, a site with information on state trivia presents a map of the United States. When using a graphical browser such as Netscape, a visitor can choose information by state. The visitor can click on Washington to find out the state bird, song, insect, flower, and other facts.

But if the web page developer has not included an alternative menu, visitors using text-based browsers can be totally blocked from the site or sent on a wild goose chase clicking unlabeled links that lead them in circles. When a visitor using a text-based browser visits the site, what he sees is this:

At this point the visitor is stuck, since text-based browsers will not interpret the hypertext links embedded in the image map. The only option is to back out of the site. A visitor who uses a text-based browser, perhaps because he is blind, cannot get to the information.

The accessibility of image maps is dependent on the server software used at a website. If "alt" attributes are included for every hyperlink in an image map, some server programs can pull the hyperlink information from the image map and present it in menu format for text-based browsers. However, many web servers do not have this capability. If this support is not available to you, you can always make the image map accessible by adding a separate navigation menu or listing of hypertext links above or below the image map.

Using "alt" attributes and alternative menus helps all of your visitors navigate through your site. The next principles we will discuss help your visitors understand the content in nontext, graphical features on your page. Including "alt" attributes is sufficient for logos and graphics that are not critical to the information content of the page. But if the graphics provide information beyond this, adding captions and transcriptions is important for those who cannot see your page because they are using a text-based browser, possibly because they are blind. Include descriptive captions for photographs and pictures. Describe images in enough detail that a visitor who cannot see the pictures will understand the content that they add to the page.

If you present information in an image format, such as a scanned-in image of a page of a manuscript, be sure to also include a transcription of the manuscript in a straight-text format. (Remember, words embedded in an image are not accessible to those using voice output systems.) This aids a wide variety of visitors, including those with visual impairments, users who speak English as a second language, and those with learning disabilities. Again, think redundancy.

Multimedia and audio formats can present barriers to people with hearing impairments and to people with less sophisticated computer systems. Provide captions and transcriptions for spoken materials so these visitors have an alternative method of accessing this information.

Special Features

Most screen reader programs read from left to right, jumbling the meaning of information in tables. Some adaptive technology can deal with format issues such as this, but it is best to look for other ways to present the information so that visitors with visual impairments can read your data. Consider using an alternative format for information that would normally be included in a table.

Use special features such as forms, databases, and plug-ins with care. Always test forms and databases with a text-based browser. Include an email address and other contact information for those who cannot use the form or database.

Use features that require plug-ins (miniprograms that run within a browser) with care. Not all people have the high-end equipment needed to download and run plug-ins. In addition, content presented with plug-ins is not always accessible through text-based web browsers. As the software is developed, applets (such as programs created with JAVA™) and plug-ins (such as Adobe® Acrobat®) may provide adequate accessibility features. However, to ensure that people with visual and hearing impairments can access your information, provide the content from these programs in other, text-based formats.

Web Page Tests

Test your web pages with as many web browsers as you can. Always use at least one text-based browser. This way, you will see your web resources from the many perspectives of your users.

Part of testing your website includes running it against an HTML validator program. These programs compare the HTML at your site with the rules of standard HTML. They generate a report listing errors and nonstandard tags. Some validators check specifically for accessibility. Try using an accessibility validation site, which performs a diagnostic on your pages and points out parts that could be inaccessible.

Teaching Students about Accessible Web Design

If you are teaching a course on web design or assigning to students the development of web pages in another course, consider requiring that students produce accessible products. Consult the publication Universal Design of Web Pages in Class Projects for ideas about how to incorporate accessible web design into your curriculum.

Summary

Whether you are developing electronic resources or designing a lab for your school, apply universal design principles to maximize access. In particular, consider these accessible web design principles when developing your school's web pages.

Institutionalization in Schools

Schools have a moral and legal responsibility to make computing resources accessible to students and community members with disabilities. They must provide accessible buildings, computers, and electronic resources. You should also demand from vendors that the products you purchase employ access features. Administrators can access further instruction for adopting and implementing web accessibility policies and procedures in their schools by consulting the publication Web Accessibility: Guidelines for Administrators.

[Picture of participants in computer lab with assistant.]

Tips for Preservice/Inservice Instruction in Access to Electronic Resources

In the Preservice/Inservice Presentations section of Part II of this notebook, you will find guidelines and materials for delivering a presentation on access to electronic resources.