Digital Accessibility

What is Digital Accessibility?

Digital accessibility is about making digital content available to everyone, including people with disabilities. This means making sure that websites, digital documents, apps, and other technologies can be used in a variety of ways and are compatible with assistive technology, such as screen readers.

Accessibility is more than just marking off a compliance checklist. It’s about people:

• A student taking an online course
• A researcher looking for articles
• A staff member referencing a policy or procedure
• A community member who wants to know what services we offer
• Anyone who wants to access and understand university content

Why Accessibility Matters

• More than 1 in 4 adults (28.7%) in the US have some type of disability
  • About 1 in 3 adults (37.8%) in Oklahoma have a disability
  • Learn more from the CDC's Disability and Health Data System
• Many people have undisclosed or undiagnosed disabilities. They shouldn't have to share personal information before getting full access.
• We want to meet students and researchers where they are. People with disabilities should not always have to ask for help getting access.
• Assistive technology is empowering for disabled users. Digital content needs to be compatible with these technologies.
• Accessibility benefits everyone. We are all only temporarily abled.
• Disability rights are civil rights. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires public institutions to to make their content and services accessible.

UCO Resources

External Resources

• Accessible
  Describes content and services that are designed to be usable and understandable, enabling effective interaction through assistive technologies. Sometimes "accessibility" is shortened to "a11y", because there are 11 letters between the "a" and "y".
   
• Alt Text
  Short for "alternative text", which refers to a text description of an image. This allows visually impaired users to hear the description from a screen reader if they cannot see the image. 
   
• Assistive Technology
  Assistive technology supports tasks that would be difficult or impossible for those with disabilities if that technology was not available. This is sometimes abbreviated to AT. Examples: Screen reader, screen magnifiers, voice browser.
   
• WCAG
  The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, are technical standards that help make the digital world accessible to people with disabilities. UCO's standard is to meet WCAG 2.1, Level AA.

Archiving Old Materials

The ultimate goal of accessibility work is to make all content fully accessible, but this takes time. Many institutions have a lot of old documents and other material to remediate, and they should prioritize what to start with. If content is outdated and/or not being used regularly, it can often be archived instead of remediated. 

• If a document or webpage is used only for reference or recordkeeping and will not need to be updated, it can be archived.
• If an archived document gets updated at some point, it is no longer considered archived content.

This kind of content archive is not the same as a library archive, where historical content is made available to library users. Digitized archival content made available for research purposes should be made as accessible as possible. This may take a while to accomplish, so it's important to communicate to library users that they can request an item to be made fully accessible for them as needed.

Chambers Library Share Drive

The Max Chambers Library is working to create a designated Archive folder on the internal Share Drive where archived content will be kept.

Individualized Documents

Many institutions use private, personalized documents for specific people, and it may not be feasible for staff to make all of these accessible. This would include:

• A graded assignment submitted in D2L
• A scanned article requested through interlibrary loan
• An invoice sent to a specific person

Even though documents like this aren't required to be made fully accessible every time, it still needs to be made clear that they CAN be made accessible by request.