Inclusion & Accessibility: Digital Accessibility

Introduction

For all instruction and work, whether it be online or in-person,  it is imperative to consider digital accessibility. Focusing on digital accessibility now can make a huge difference in an individual’s experience later. There are 4 main checklist items to do this.

Use Word or Google Docs

It is much easier to make a Google Doc or Word document accessible than to use PDFs, unless you are well acquainted with making accessible PDFs.

• Grackle is a useful tool to automatically check your Google Docs and Google Slides for accessibility
• Microsoft Office offers a useful accessibility checker built-in to Word and PowerPoint

Use contextual links

Make sure when you link to another website or document - from an email, website, or document - that you use a link in context 

• Use: NYU Website
• Don’t Use: NYU Website: http://www.nyu.edu

Correct video captions

NYU Stream offers automatic captions for videos that you upload, which is roughly 90% accurate. After correction, these are useful for those that need to be able to read and search through a video’s content quickly.

• For pre-recorded videos uploaded to NYU Stream
• Captioning in Zoom
• How to make effective captions

Tag your photos

Also called alt tags and alt descriptions, alt text is the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if the image fails to load on a user's screen. This text helps screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers.

• Using Google to make your content more accessible