ADA Compliance

• As a Content Contributor, a great way to help ensure content you author on web pages is accessible is to use free automated accessibility browser extension tools. They allow you to learn as you use them. As you identify problems and how to resolve them with these tools, you avoid making the same mistakes again. It’s a great first step in self-educating about web accessibility.
  • Some popular, reputable, and free web accessibility checkers available that can be installed as web browser add-ons, extensions or plugins include:
    • Axe browser extensions
    • Tota11y Accessibility Toolkit Firefox Add-on
    • WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
    • Pa11y CLI Web Accessibility Tools
• The principles: You may have heard of the POUR acronym. The following brief list gives you a quick idea of what each involves.
  • Perceivable: Making web content accessible to the senses of hearing, sight, and touch (for example: providing image alt text, audio/video captions, optimizing reading order, including form field purpose, validating adequate color contrast, text spacing).
  • Operable: Making web content such as forms, controls, and navigation accessible (for example: keyboard navigability, timing controls, no flashing, providing skip methods, optimizing focus order, specifying link purpose, using sequential headings, allowing non-keyboard input).
  • Understandable: Making web information and user interface functionality understandable (for example: specifying language, defining abbreviations, optimizing reading level, focus indication, errors and help).
  • Robust: Making web content accessible to a wide variety of devices, platforms and assistive technologies (for example: hardware compatibility, future-proofing, parsing, programmatic names, roles, values and status messages).

The same principles that apply to Web accessibility also apply to document accessibility. Documents must be Perceivable, Understandable, Operable, and Robust (POUR). It is important to keep in mind that certain document formats allow greater control over accessibility than others.

• Most accessible to least accessible: Always consider if the content can live on the web first, keeping in mind the following in order of most accessible to least accessible formats:
  • HTML: Consider the intended audience first when determining appropriateness (most accessible). For more information, see the Web Accessibility tab on this page.
    • Image: A .png or .jpg graphic such as a chart or graph can be made accessible with alt text (and accompanying text) if it is destined for the web.
    • Video: Can be made accessible via synchronized closed captions in YouTube, which can then be embedded on a web page (with accompanying transcript).
    • Audio: Can be embedded on a web page with accessible media player widget (with accompanying transcript).
  • PDF: Make accessible in the source format first (next most accessible if converted properly).
  • Office: Word, Excel, PowerPoint (can be made accessible using built-in checker).
  • Google Docs: Docs, Sheets, Slides (least accessible, but can be made as accessible as possible using an installed add-on called Grackle).
    • When working with Google docs, you must make your document accessible to the general public, but only at a Viewer level, so others cannot change the content of your document.
• Documents from external sources: If you would like to provide users with a document from an external source, link directly to the website where the document can be found, rather than uploading the document to the content management system and then linking to it. Uploading a document from an external source poses multiple problems:
  • Because Oakland University does not own the document or have access to edit it, it is not possible to remediate it and ensure that it is ADA Compliant.
  • If the content of the document is updated and a new version is available from the source, Oakland University would be providing the user with outdated information in the version available on oakland.edu.
• High-level process: A typical process for producing an accessible document involves the following three steps:
  • Make the document as accessible as possible in source format first (for example, paste content into Word, use the built-in Accessibility checker on the Review ribbon to view/fix errors).
  • Optimize the conversion settings to PDF for accessibility, then convert (for example, by exporting/converting to a tagged PDF using a cloud service optimized for accessibility).
  • Fix any remaining errors in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC (for example, by using the Full Check in the Accessibility tool, then using error explanations to fix)

Content managers should attempt to remediate any documents that will be used on a web page. If further questions arise, follow the normal process of contacting your Account Manager with any requests pertaining to web or document accessibility. University Communications and Marketing can provide guidance on remediation, if the scope of the project allows. Your Account Manager can provide the contact information of a third party that can assist in remediation of large or more complex projects.