Alt Text & Universal Design

Hello Everyone,

Here is the syllabus for the Alt Text & Universal Design course.
The course covers 2 major ideas:
1) why and how to make digital media accessible to people with vision and hearing impairments
2) creating meaningful alt text for images that are helpful for screen reader users and a wider audience.

As you can see the syllabus covers a lot of information and we will likely need to pare it down a bit. Let's collaborate on what you want to focus on.

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1) Intro to Course

• Why design accessible Web sites?
• What is assistive technology?
• Discussion of experience using screen-reader
• Assignment:
  • Read:
    • WebAIM's Designing for Screen Reader Compatibility: http://webaim.org/techniques/screenreader/
  • Use a Screen reader:
    • http://webaim.org/techniques/screenreader/ includes links to JAWS and Window Eyes trials and an explanation about what it's like to use a screen reader for the first time.  For Mac users, VoiceOver is available on every Mac. Use one of the screen readers to view pages from various websites and report experiences and frustrations in navigation and images.

2) How to Describe Images for Children and Adults

• Introduction to Text Alternatives for Images
• How people who are blind and visually impaired learn about the visual world
• How to describe images for younger children, older children and adults.
• Assignment:
  • Read:
    • WebAIM's Creating Accessible Images: http://webaim.org/techniques/images/
  • Describe:
    • Set of images to describe for different age ranges

3) How to Describe Science and Complex Images

• Discuss image descriptions completed in assignment
• STEM Description Guidelines
• Assignment:
  • Describe:
    • set of STEM images
  • Read:
    • WGBH's STEM Description Guidelines: http://ncam.wgbh.org/experience_learn/educational_media/stemdx

4) Introduction to Accessible Websites & Legal Requirements, How to Add Image Descriptions to Websites

• Discuss image descriptions completed in assignment
• Recommendations and requirements: 508, WCAG 2.0, ARIA 1.0
• How to create Accessible Websites
  • current and future approaches (alt, longdesc, prodnote, aria, etc)
• How to add image descriptions to DTBs, ebooks, word, PDF, PPT
• Assignment:
  • Add alt text to webpage or PDF or DTB, etc.
  • Read:
    • WGBH's Accessible Digital Media Guidelines (especially Guidelines A, C, D, F, G): http://ncam.wgbh.org/invent_build/web_multimedia/accessible-digital-medi...

5) How to Create Accessible Multimedia

• Discuss assignment of adding alt text
• Requirements and Recommendations
• Adding Captions
• Adding Video Descriptions
• Assignment
  • Add Captions and Description to a short video
  • Read:
    • Finish WGBH's Accessible Digital Media Guidelines: http://ncam.wgbh.org/invent_build/web_multimedia/accessible-digital-media-guide
    • Described and Captioned Media Program's Description Key: http://www.dcmp.org/descriptionkey/index.html

            http://www.dcmp.org/descriptionkey/background.html

6) DIAGRAM Center and Course Review

• Discuss image descriptions added to web pages and/or DTBs completed in assignment
• Overview of DIAGRAM Center and how to follow standards activities.
              http://diagramcenter.org/
• Course Review