Course Design

Digital Accessibility

While accessibility is necessary for some groups to use the web, it is beneficial for everyone.

NYU Digital Accessibility

NYU adheres to the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, Level AA standards. Anyone creating digital content at NYU is responsible for creating content that complies.

You can find comprehensive resources and guidelines through the Digital Accessibility Website, such as:

Our Quick Start Accessibility Guide offers a sampling of quick start guides and resources.

ITP Cheat Sheet

This agreement covers websites and content published publicly on NYU’s public websites as well as content posted on Social Media and other platforms (GitHub, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, self hosted, etc) on behalf of NYU for class or other use.

While this agreement does not cover student or faculty personal pages or websites, it does cover work published by students to publicly available course websites such as a blog for a specific course where the students embed their work.  If they are simply linking to their own site the content of their own site, that does not need to be compliant.

This agreement does not cover sites or content that are not publicly available such as those behind password protection or otherwise only available to students in a particular class.  For instance, material for a class using NYU’s Learning Management System, NYU Classes, is only available to members of that class and is exempt.  Therefore, putting materials behind password protection may be a viable short term solution.  If this is something you would like to do, please contact us and we can help you work out a way to do so.

Finally, NYU has put together an extensive website related to Digital Accessibility that is very much worth going through.

Infrastructure

ITP Hosted WordPress

We at ITP/IMA are in the process of implementing a theme and installing a set of plugins for use with WordPress that will help ensure that our blogs (classes blogs and so on) meet these standards. If you would like to use our WordPress Classes, please contact ITP’s helpdesk@itp.nyu.edu to help set you up with an account. We will password-protect those sites until we have the theme ready and in-place. Please do ensure that any content you publish meets the accessibility standards (see the Content section below).

The NYU Web Publishing service also has a convenient list of accessibility-ready themes that they have tested, and a list of themes they know are not accessible. 

The University of Washington has some great pages on web accessibility. See, for example, this page on creating accessible menus, and see the work of Terrill F. Thompson in general.

Other Platforms

For pages published elsewhere or using other technology, the onus is on the creator or maintainer of the site to ensure that it’s structure is compliant with WCAG 2.0AA standards. NYU has a set of guidelines and testing tools for developing accessible sites. Before you publish a custom site or pages hosted elsewhere please let us know so that we have a record of the site and can do a quick compliance check.

Some platforms that we currently use are already compliant on a site level and we feel confident in their continued use although any content published on these platforms should be compliant (see below).  

GitHub

We have checked GitHub.com in general and its interface should be compliant (although any published GitHub Pages will have to be created using accessible standards and should go through the process outlined above).  

Google Sites and Google Classroom

Google Sites and Google Classroom have support for screen readers although it is unclear at this moment if they are fully WCAG 2.0AA compliant. We recommend only making these sites or pages available to students in your class rather than public.

Other Platforms

We are evaluating other platforms as needed and will be updating this page with additional information. Please check in with us before publishing using platforms that we haven’t already checked.

Guidelines from NYU about using Social Media and other platforms

Content

For anyone creating content whether it is published on an ITP hosted blog, social media, or elsewhere, needs to be created in an accessible manner. Here is a quick rundown on how to create different types of content that are accessible with links to further resources:

Documents and PDFs

NYU’s Digital Accessibility site has a series of guides on ensuring that documents you create with Google Docs, Microsoft Word, PDFs, and so on are accessible. Please go through these as you create these types of documents for material that is posted online or for classroom use.

In particular, when creating PDFs, ensure that you are exporting as a PDF rather than printing as a PDF from your application. This will go a long way towards ensuring compliance as the text contained in the document will remain text rather than rendered as an image that happens when printing as a PDF.

Images

Images must have accurate “alt-text” when published online. Images should not contain textual information (phone numbers, addresses, names) and if they are info graphics they must contain full text descriptions in the body of the page.

When an image is purely aesthetic or decorative the “alt-text” may be blank (alt-text=””) but must still be included.

NYU’s Digital Accessibility site has another great guide relating to images.

Audio and Video

As videos are becoming increasingly important in our class use, it is important that we pay special attention to ensuring their accessibility.  In particular, we have to ensure that videos have accurate closed captioning. Videos hosted on YouTube can be captioned using their captioning tool manually or automatically. If you use the automated service, these captions must be edited to correct punctuation and do things such as indicating speaker changes.
Please review NYU’s Digital Accessibility site for more information on working with Audio and Video.

Training

On NYU’s Digital Accessibility site, there are a variety of resources including trainings and consultations on creating accessible sites and content. We are going to be attending this training as well as organizing sessions for ITP/IMA Faculty and Staff. Please feel free to attend and utilize these resources on your own as well.