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Accessibility and the Web

Guidelines

New December 11, 2008
WCAG 2.0 Accessibility Guidelines

W3C published a new standard to better meet the needs of users with disabilities and older users.

Check out some of
EASI's Online Conferences

EASI is a provider of online training on accessible information technology for persons with disabilities.

Accessibility in Distance Education (ADR) - The University of Maryland's web resource for faculty in online teaching provides how-to's, best practices, and legal information.
508 Web Accessibility - Jim Thatcher's in-depth tutorial for developing accessible websites.
Section 508 Checklist with "pass" and "fail" criteria.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) from Colorado State University
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Best Practices from San Francisco State University
WebABLE Solutions 508 Guidelines includes WCAG 1.0 checkpoints and WAI coding techniques.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 from WC3 (updated Dec. 11, 2008). These standards have been updated to be more flexible and usable for people creating web content. WCAG 2.0 explains how to create accessible audio, video, text, and images.
11 Quick and Easy Tips for Accessible Content - My list of a few ways to create accessible content in Blackboard, easy enough for anyone to implement

Use the following free tools to check your website for accessibility.

A-Prompt Web Accessibility Verifier
Functional Accessibility Evaluator
This web-based evaluator, created by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, analyzes web pages for market and provides detailed feedback about problem areas.
WAVE 3.0 Accessibility Tool
Cynthia Says Portal
Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox

Color Laboratory -- AWARE Center -- HTML Writers Guild allows you to select colors and see how they appear next to one another, and in various foreground/background combinations. It also allows you to see those colors as they might appear to color-blind users. (free)
Color Scheme Generator by WellStyled is an online color scheme generator that allows you to create different variations and view for different types of color blindness.
Color Vision - by Cal Henderson is a tool that simulates the appearance of colors for people with different color visions. Select text and background colors from the palette, then choose a color vision mode.
Vischeck-Color Blind checker checks images and url's for colorblindess. Vischeck provides a plug-in for Photoshop.
Vischeck- Daltonize color correction provides online color correction of images. (free)
Forms
Quick Form Builder from Accessify - This form builder from accessify will create a valid and accessible form for your Web page in three steps. You will enter the fields, define the field types, and choose a markup option.

Accessify Easy YouTube caption creator - Since YouTube now supports captioning, people wonder how to easily create captions for their movies. This little tool will create the captions for your video (must be posted on YouTube). There are other options, which take more effort and provide more output options, but this is by far the fastest way to get your captions created in the proper format. You will have to have the text available.
Captioning Bibliography - A list of Web resources related to online captioning, including tutorials.
CPB-WGBH National Center for Accessible Media is a research and development facility dedicated to the issues of media and information technology for people with disabilities in their homes, schools, workplaces, and communities.
Project ADEPT - University of Arkansas at Little Rock's Project for A ccessible D istance E ducation for P ostsecondary T eaching - The staff at DSS and STaR have come up with a method to provide videostreams that show the instructor and PowerPoint, interpreter, and scrolling captions all on one screen (see example below). This makes the videostreams accessible for hard of hearing students, as well as students who use American Sign Language.
University of Washington, Do-It describes how to create video and multimedia products that are accessible to people with sensory impairments.

FANGS Screen Reader Emulator for Firefox
popular add-on for firefox browser
NVDA
Free and open source screen reader application from NV Access, available as an installer or as a portable application.
WebAnywhere
Free web-based screen reader, nothing to install