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QA Course Overview
Required
The Quality Assurance Rubric, for the Accessibility Section 1.3 states:
The course is compliant with current accessibility standards.
From the SD Board of Regents
Expectations
- Current accessibility standards are wide ranging and impact various areas of the course; ergo, to satisfy this standard, the course must:
- Provide for text alternatives of images and other non-text content, including user interface components
- Provide that pre-recorded audio is available in a visible format and that silent animations are available in an audible format
- Provide for synchronized captioning of pre-recorded video and multimedia
- Provide for audio description of pre-recorded video and multimedia
- Provide for captioning of live video and multimedia
- Provide that information and prompts are not conveyed only through color
- Provide for specified contrast between foreground and background of text and images of text (e.g. 4.5:1)
- Provide for the use of text, as opposed to images of text
- Provide that headings and labels are descriptive
Examples
- Courses utilizing visual elements, such as charts and graphs, must provide text-based descriptions of these.
- Courses utilizing videos or animations with spoken text, music with lyrics, actions, etc. must provide synchronized captions, including text descriptions of music, actions/events, etc. Such captions must be 99% accurate or better. The same is true of live video (e.g. lectures, presentations, etc.).
- In general, colors should be avoided as visual cues (e.g. "Click on the red arrow to continue.")
- Content should have sufficient contrast between the foreground and background (e.g. avoid red text on a white background, etc.).
- Documents should present accessible text; namely, no scans of chapters in PDF format that have not been processed via optical character recognition.
- Tables should have headings or labels that sufficiently describe the contents in rows or columns, and use the appropriate markup to indicate this (e.g. TH element in HTML; in Word, creating header rows/columns, etc.).
- Images should have alternate descriptions (via the ALT attribute in HTML, or populating the appropriate field in D2L when inserting images).
- MathML should be used for all equations and formulae.
- Course content should be organized by module/week/topic, not by type, as this is easier for students to navigate when using assistive technology.
References
DSU Knowledge Base Articles
Accessibility in Documents
Accessibility in D2L
https://support.dsu.edu/TDClient/1796/Portal/KB/?CategoryID=24471