Digital Accessibility Work

During my internship with UNC’s School of Government, I conducted an accessibility review of an online course, identified potential improvements, and worked with a small team to implement the changes.

First, I learned about accessibility standards for the web. I drew on resources from UNC’s Digital Accessibility Office, like the Web Accessibility eValuation Tool (WAVE) from WebAIM.

Then, I reviewed the drafted materials with accessibility in mind. Here is a sample of the results of my review.

Accessibility Review for the Adult Protection Network's Multi-disciplinary Teams modules The key ways to improve the accessibility of the Adult Protection Network’s course are to provide captions and transcripts, provide user controls for audio and video media, adjust slides’ focus order, and add alt text for images. There are minor additional changes that could be made to colors, text format, button text, and activity choice. Some key items have already been done well. Users can increase the size of the content using browser controls, which can boost text size. Horizontal scroll has not been used in the course. The titles in purple text on a white background provide excellent contrast. Some decorative elements of slides have already been marked for screen readers to ignore. To improve the accessibility of the courses, I recommend the following. Audio The best option is to provide all audio narration with a user-controllable player. • Add all voiceover to slides with a player that the user can control pause, play, restart, and volume. • When done this way, you can add captions through the player. Additionally, add the spoken audio to the page transcript. • Find it on the Page Transcript tab at the bottom of the screen. • Adding a page transcript automatically adds an option to turn on the transcript to the player. If it needs to be more visible, there is an option to add a "Show transcript" button to pages. • Note: The page transcript persists from page to page and blocks page content.

From there, the Instructional Design team discussed the results and determined which changes were feasible. I made the requested changes to one module, tracking the time spent, and created this project plan to scope the total required time required.

APN Accessibility Implementation Plan Goal: Improve the accessibility of the APN Multi-Disciplinary Teams course. Roles and responsibilities: [table showing who is responsible for what] Tasks and time estimates: [table showing the task, time taken to complete for module 1, and estimated time to complete for the other modules. The total time estimate is 63 hours.]

As a team, we were able to complete the improvements for the course’s publication date. It is currently available in a proprietary learning management system, but “Building Multi-disciplinary Teams” will soon appear on the Adult Protection Network’s website.

I presented this work in a digital poster session at the OLC Innovate conference on April 12, 2024. This was exciting! I was able to have great conversations with several attendees, including about when to mark images as decorative.

View my presentation on LinkedIn