Title: Techrangers and Accessibility
Course: Dev_TOPKIT_SAMPLE_COURSE_Bauer_S_67 > Section: Week 8 - Support, Scholarship, and Peer Review

<<Note: This content is provided as an example. The content should be updated with your department's available resources.>>

Overview

This module section highlights the UCF Techrangers® team and their support for online courses at UCF. The Techrangers® is a team of students at the Center for Distributed Learning, who provide course development for faculty and web/application development for the University of Central Florida (UCF). It is a good idea to know the team, their purpose, and when you can contact them for assistance.

What We Do

- Accessibility - Ensuring that all course content that goes through CDL is accessible for students with disabilities. We are the ones who do accessibility evaluations for courses as well as make existing content accessible.
- Course Development - Implementation of the content that you, the instructor, have provided, into your course in Canvas. Also turning HTML files into pages.
- Application Development - We create custom interactions for use in courses as well as internal applications that help us do our jobs more efficiently. We help create Materia widgets and Obojobo learning objects.
- Training/Community Outreach - Various TechTime presentations to the community covering technology related topics.
  - TechTime
  - Facebook:  UCFTechrangers
  - Twitter:  @techrangers
  - Google+:  Techrangers

Accessibility/Categories of Disabilities

This sections covers the categories of accessibility we consider and make accessible when placing materials in an online course:

- Cognitive
- Visual
- Auditory
- Motor

Cognitive

- Dyslexia - avoid justified text that adds weird spacing
- ADD - avoid long documents, break content up when possible
- ADHD - avoid long documents, break content up when possible
- Visual Comprehension - avoid using unnecessary images

Visual

- Blindness
- Color Blindness
- Low Vision

Visibility issues can include blindness, color blindness, and low vision. Students who are blind can use a screen reader, such as JAWS,  to navigate and read content from a site. We’ve run our syllabus template through JAWS and recorded it so you can get an idea of what a student who is blind would experience.

Color Blindness

Here you can see an example of good contrast and bad contrast. As you can see, the good contrast is easy to read as you can see the letters clearly against the background.

The bad contrast examples are a little harder to process. However, if you were actually color blind…

It might look like this. To make things easier on everyone, try not to use color at all in your documents. Instead, you can emphasize parts of your document by bolding or italicizing text.

Use of Color

Here are two examples of how you should not use color, and one example of how you can use color. Color-based emphasis will not transfer to a screen reader. The second example could present contrast issues depending on the colors. The third example, which is bolded, will work.

Low Vision

Here is an example of an image with embedded text contrasted with text outside of the image. They both look clear at the standard magnification, but when enlarged the text within the image becomes unclear while normal text within a document maintains it’s clarity. If a portion of text is important, it should be accessible outside the image, for the users of both screen-readers and magnifiers.

Other Common Issues Found in Files

- Images without ALT text
- Tables without proper headers
- Using tables for layout
- Videos and narrated PowerPoint presentations without closed captioning
- Audio without a transcript
- Improperly formatted PowerPoints and Word DOCs
- Untagged or image-based PDFs

Take Action - UDOIT Information

The Universal Design Online content Inspection Tool, or UDOIT (pronounced, “You Do It”) enables faculty to identify accessibility issues in Canvas. It will scan a course, generate a report, and provide resources on how to address common accessibility issues.

Learn more: https://online.ucf.edu/teach-online/resources/udoit/

Course Development and Techrangers are here for you!

We always try to provide best practices and support to faculty teaching online.  If at any time you need assistance, do not hesitate to contact our team or your instructional designer.

Have more complex ideas for pages? For complex page designs or interactive experiences, talk to your ID. They will help decide what is possible, and we will help make it happen!

- Pages allow for easy editing
  - Not very flexible
  - Limit interactivity
- More complex ideas?
  - Page designs
  - Interactive experiences
    - Materia
    - Obojobo

Please feel free to contact your instruction al designer or the Techrangers® team team if you have questions or need assistance with your content.

TOPKit Sample Course was prepared by the University of Central Florida (UCF). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.