Learn more about accessibility and universal design from these resources at Penn State and other organizations.
Penn State
- Penn State Accessibility Site — the official accessibility resource for Penn State that includes the syllabus statement language, software information, a course accessibility checklist, and much more
- ACC 101: Accessible Course Creation — a resource for those developing online courses and use Evolution, which is the content management system used in World Campus Learning Design and other shops
- Accessibility Users Group — a resource for and by members of the Accessibility Users Group, a group made up of online education staff from across the University who are the accessibility point people for their unit.
- OL 2600: Course Authoring Accessibility Basics – An online faculty development course offered several times a year. The personas are utilized in this course to teach people how to create accessible content in Canvas.
Organizations
- World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) — defines global web standards, including the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG)
- WCAG 2.0 Guidelines — a subset of the W3C that defines web content accessibility guidelines; the normative section defines the legal standard
- National Center on Universal Design for Learning — this center is run by CAST, the organization that founded UDL and includes an online book that explains UDL principles and practices
- WebAIM — web accessibility information
- DO-IT Center for Universal Design in Education — great resources on universal design in the context of higher education
- DIAGRAM Center website includes many resources
- the Poet Training site on image description examples and strategies
- ImageShare, which is an accessible image repository
- information about accessible math
- information about accessible publishing, and
- BookShare, which is a source of accessible textbooks.
Tools
- WAVE Toolbar — this is a tool that allows users to test websites for errors such as missing heading levels, missing alt text, and poor color contrast. It also allows for viewing the page without styles and has a color contrast checker tool. It can be used by going to their site and putting in the url to the page you want to test, or by installing a browser plug in.
- Web Developer Extension — the is a browser plugin that works with Firefox and Chrome that provides useful information about the page code, including CSS and Javascript, and allows you to inspect the HMTL elements, including alt text.
- Free Online OCR — this is a website where you can upload an image of text to get the actual text.
- WebAIM: Color Contrast Checker — this is a website with tools for testing color contrast to make sure colors meet WCAG 2.0 guidelines.
