The importance of Accessibility in school
Accessibility is the practice of making your content usable by as many people as possible.
This is especially helpful within a learning environment, as making content usable to all students and staff encourages, promotes and supports all facets of learning. Differentiation and inclusivity are hugely important, especially in an education setting.
Everyone reads, learns and consumes content in different ways, and for some people there are challenges in doing so. For example, people who have:
- Hearing disabilities
- Motor/Mobility disabilities
- Cognitive disabilities, such as Dyslexia, ADD & Asperger's
- Colour blindness
may need extra consideration to allow them to access your content entirely, or in a more comfortable way that facilitates understanding.
Accessit Library managing and improving Accessibility
At Accessit Library, our content is predominantly Web Based, and following Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is highly important to us.
These guidelines are helpful for any business or organisation producing web-based content, as well as for you and your school producing content for your pupils.
Not only do we at Accessit Library follow these guidelines with the work we do ourselves, but we ensure that the work we create allows you to do the same for your pupils.
This is particularly important to consider when using the Accessit Library Web App, as it is accessible to the whole school and perhaps beyond, depending on your settings.
Accessit Library Web App
On the Accessit Library Web App, you can create and customise an extensive range of different items.
This can also include:
- Book reviews
- Images
- Videos
- Interactive games and more.
Accessit Library's extensive range of news items can be customised to maximise accessibility for any Accessit Library user, including yourself and your pupils. These can be categorised into: text, images and video.
Text
There is an extensive range of text styles, fonts and sizes to choose from on the Accessit Library Web App, as well as the option to determine both the font colour and background colours.
Also, when linking a piece of text with a URL for a user to navigate to, it is important that you clearly indicate what it is. If you’re embedding a link to a reading list within a news item, clearly indicate that this is the purpose of the link (i.e., “click here to see our Diverse and Inclusive Reading List”).
Font Styles
You can select from a group of Block Styles for your headings and subheadings to group and categorise text.
Our extensive list of Inline Styles can be used in a range of different ways and can be tailored to the purpose of your news item.
There is also an entirely separate range of font styles to choose from.
Sentence structure
It is important to use a large enough font size or body text that people can comfortably read.
At the least, this should be 16px. Sentence structures of 45-75 words per line is acceptable and 66 characters per line is comfortable. Text that is too small to read comfortably will discourage your borrowers from engaging with it, which is the opposite of your intention.
A logical hierarchy of headers allows the user to make sense of which information is the most important, with the bigger size more likely to capture their attention. There are a number of Heading sizes to choose from on the Accessit Library Web App.
It is also important to order text in a way that makes sense to the user. Naturally, we read from left to right, so by default it is best to structure text this way. However, when combining text with images it can be more visually appealing to centre the text. Below is an example of text aligned to the left as well as centred text.
Text Colour Contrast
In terms of accessibility, the use of text is more than deciding which font to use. Often, the font colour is the most important factor to decide, particularly when contrasted with the background colour.
When creating a news item on the Accessit Library Web App, you can easily change both the font and background colour, choosing from a ready-to-go palette or selecting your own.
Colour contrast is important to get right as it can be difficult for those visually impaired to read coloured text overlayed on a background colour that doesn’t work correctly. A helpful tool to ensure correct colour contrasts can be found by clicking here.
Images
Alternative text
A significant factor in image accessibility is alternative text, or alt text for short.
Alternative text is text that could essentially be provided in place of an image. It should convey the purpose of the image, not describe the image.
The most effective use of alternative text is to write a description of what the image is, so when screen reader encounters an image, it will attempt to read the alternative text and communicate the image to someone who is blind, has low vision or cognitive disabilities.
Alternative text should be a maximum of 50 characters and are also important when images do not load. This often happens as a result of slow internet connection, but people with cognitive disabilities may also prefer to disable images from loading in general. In either case, the internet browser will show the image's alternative text.
Users with low vision may also magnify the page. When magnified, images can appear pixelated and hard to understand. This demonstrates another reason why alternative text is particularly helpful.
You can create alternative text for an image on the Accessit Library Web App within Image Properties > Image Info.
Image Colour Contrast
Similar to the need for colour contrast in text mentioned above, colour contrast here is also a factor of image accessibility. One of the easiest ways to align your designs with the WCAG is to use strong colour contrast. Colourblind users benefit when all content (including images) uses generous colour contrast ratios. This allows them to access the text (read it) much more easily.
Pairing colour with shapes, icons, explanatory text, or some combination of all three, can help ensure you're communicating clearly. To simulate how people with different vision types would view your design, download Color Oracle.
Layout
Visual accessibility isn't only defined by the structure of images. Layout is also very important.
Layout includes the order in which things are grouped, the order in which elements receive focus and where the focus moves when the element in focus disappears. Similar to a logical hierarchy of headers, a logical hierarchy of news items supports the user accessing your page's content by helping them make the most sense of the overall content they are consuming.
When creating news items, a suggestion to achieve improved accessibility would be to identify the value and purpose of each one. It would be helpful to group similarly themed news items together to improve the workflow your students will follow when accessing the page.
This will encourage you to create content with a goal in mind and in a way that will effectively capture your students' attention. Creating numerous news items without this is a risk to losing their attention.
You can try this out on the online environment of the Accessit Library Web App, particularly with the ability to create multiple dashboards with layouts dedicated to specific topics. This allows you to focus on creating spatial layouts with the purpose of retaining the students' attention for the specific topic.
Interactive Games
Videos
Closed Captions
We ensure that all of our videos at Accessit Library have the option to enable closed captions.
This is helpful for viewers with hearing impairments by enabling them to read written words matching the spoken words in the video, ie. following the perceivable and understandable WCAG guidelines above.
Of course, turning closed captions on is also available when embedding ours and others' videos on your Accessit Library Web App. Particularly, embedding our student guide videos which we encourage and can be found on our online help portal.
You can access our help portal by clicking here.
Transcripts
We have transcripts for all of our videos throughout our eLearning centre and for the majority of our videos on our online help portal.
Again, this supports audio impaired viewers and is also a huge advantage by enabling the ability to locate any piece of information throughout the entirety of a video.
Overall, this is important as the majority of our video content is tutorial videos, and depending on the purpose of the video, the transcripts can also be an effective set of instructions that can be read, providing more than one way for our videos to be followed and information attained.
Accessibility Conclusion
Thinking about accessibility means thinking about the user's experience, and it is important to achieve accessibility whilst focusing on the quality of this experience, not just compliance with guidelines.
These guidelines can feel like an unfamiliar additional step to your existing work processes, yet, understanding the small changes you can make to your text, images and videos will support your work and support your students' user experience, achieving accessibility for any individual. It will also show that you support and provide differentiation for students and staff with additional accessibility needs.
Afterall, it is especially important within the school environment to include all learners and encourage all types of learning.
Refrences
For further information, please click on the links below