Do you post blogs, tweet, develop and update websites? Are you a designer, developer, or usability professional? Do you know what are the best practices to use for digital accessibility on your platform?
It is something we are slowly coming to grips with in the Library, making sure our users can navigate websites and our social media platforms with a keyboard alone, our webpages are accessible and usable for low vision/visually impaired users, and elements can be read by screen readers correctly,
Why are these things important to know about and plan for? The below video by UX Mastery from raises some really important points on why we need to design and build digital platforms to be accessible.
Making content and platforms more digitally accessible
- Experience first hand what it is like to navigate your website, social media platform, application or device without a mouse or trackpad
- can you tell where you are as you navigate around the screen with tab and shift tab keys?
- can you interact with all the elements?
- can you use your keyboard to reveal drop down menus, tooltips or other actions?
- Check your page has adequate colour contrast for low vision users.
- When using images provide alternative text tags
- Use a screen reader on your app or website, or to surf the net in general to get an idea of how they work
- Check out the resources provided by the Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C) on how you can make websites more accessible.
- Contribute to projects such as Fix the Web
Give us feedback on how accessible our Library resources are
- We are currently checking all our Library Resource Guides to ensure all the images contain alternative text
- Have you found something that doesn’t work? Email the webteam at website-accessibility@csu.edu.au.
If you’re interested in how we strive to make our webpages accessible have a look through the CSU website accessibility page for more information.