Core Skills for Digital Accessibility

Become an A11y by learning these Core Skills that constitute the basics of digital accessibility. Know how to successfully create accessible online content including documents, presentations, email messages, video lectures, and more.
Headings
Use headings to format the structure of your webpage or document.
Alternative Text
Alt text on images tell the user what the image conveys.
Links
Links must be descriptive to identify to the user where the link goes.
Color Contrast
Appropriate color contrast allows the reader to see the text or image.
Video & Audio
Captions, transcripts, and descriptive audio communicate visual information via text.
Lists
Numbered and ordered lists provide structure and improve readability and navigation.
Tables
Row and column headers provide context for tabular information. 
Text Readability
Font size, style, and format are important to enable the user to read the text.
More Resources
Access self-paced training in ElevatED for more in-depth information, as well as resources from the Office of Accessibility, the Biggio Center, and OIT.

Frequently Asked Questions

If you are posting recordings your lectures or presentations, you should use Panopto to generate captions. Make sure they are turned on before recording. Check the captions for correctness and make any necessary edits before posting to Canvas, Box, or other platform for students to access.

You can also use Panopto, Teams, or Microsoft Transcribe to convert speech to text for live captioning of your lectures or presentations. 

Transcripts of your lectures, presentations, or meetings can also be generated from the captions in Panopto, Teams, Microsoft Transcribe.

You can use PDFs if they are appropriately checked and remediated for accessibility. This includes tagging elements, specifying reading order, and other necessary steps. Check out our training on Document Accessibility 101 in ElevatED for "how to" videos.

If you can provide the same information in a more accessible format such as HTML by linking to an online version of the text available through AU Libraries, or in Word format, that is usually easier to meet accessiblity requirements.

Alt text should provide a short description of what the image is conveying to the reader. You do not need to include "picture of" or "image of" in your one or two sentence description. Alt text should be no longer than a tweet, but enough detail to paint a visual picture for the user.

 

Find out more
Accessibility Toolkit