Accessibility

Open.Michigan is committed to making U-M's learning resources open and accessible to all individuals. Why stop at copyright? Therefore, we have begun compiling guidelines for both our website and the materials we publish to make sure the content is accessible to as many downstream users as possible.

Drupal website platform
Our newly designed Drupal platform follows Section 508 rules and WAI/WCAG standards and guidelines. We've also worked hard to implement accessible CSS. If we've missed something, we would love to know about it. The following might be of some help for other Drupal users/developers:

Accessibility Group

PHP Library and Drupal Module for checking accessibility

YouTube
If we provide a transcript to YouTube, the closed captioning is excellent. If they do the machine transcript, it's lacking in accuracy.

OER/downloadable content
Generally we create multiple versions of downloadable documents (.pdf, .ppt, .doc, .odp, etc.) and we rarely use scanned images or text. All scanned documents use OCR. As of today (8.17.10) we do not add alt tags to images within a PDF, but we're interested in learning and implementing best practices for document and PDF accessibility.

OCW Accessibility Policies/Guidelines
We're in touch with OCWC and MIT OCW about their current web/document accessibility policies. Below is a link to both the OCWC guidelines and the MIT accessibility site.

OCWC Accessibility Guidelines

MIT Accessibility

MIT OCW Accessibility Requirements

 * All PDFs must be tagged, optimized and have the language set. Instructions for these settings are included below.
 * Handwritten and scanned content is not allowed unless (1) optical character recognition (OCR) has been successfully and accurately applied; or (2) the Publication Director agrees that the material in the document is too valuable to the user experience to be excluded and that the material would also be too difficult to reproduce in an accessible form.
 * It is preferred but not required that all images contained in PDFs have alt-text. However, all images created by or for OCW (commissioned images) must have alt-text.
 * Each PDF should have at least 80% selectable text (approximate). Text that cannot be selected is considered inaccessible, but we recognize that sometimes text appears as part of an image and that often times equations can be problematic, so our threshold is lowered for those allowances. If a 10-page PDF has 8 pages of slides and two pages of text, and the two pages of text have 80% selectable text, the PDF is NOT accessible. If each of those eight pages of images has useful alt text and the remaining two pages of text are 80% selectable, the PDF is accessible.
 * Any document linked in a course (including material hosted externally) that does not meet all of the above criteria must be marked with a # and a message declaring that the document is not accessible. The only difference in how external files are treated is that you may automatically include them without seeking Publication Director approval, as long as they are marked inaccessible.

Other Accessibility Resources

 * WebAIM


 * U-M draft web accessibility guidelines - [[Media:Accessibility_Quick_Guide.pdf|PDF]]


 * WebAIM guide to making PPT accessible


 * WebAIM DreamWeaver extension for evaluating website accessibility


 * Accessibility at University of Minnesota