5 Quick Tips for Web Accessibility

5 Quick Tips for Web Accessibility

  1. Clean up! Go through your Files and remove any unused or uncessary ones. When using the Ally tool to assess accessibility, if your course has alot of unecessary files then will skew your score. The less files you have to fix the better!

    1. While you are doing that add document titles to your files. “Week 3_reading_final_v2.pdf” tells a screen reader nothing.

    2. Set document language: File → Properties → Description → Language Field

  2. Alt-Text: Add Alt-text to your images. AI is great at providing short 100 word description for images (see Making Images and Videos Accessible)

  3. OCR: Use Acrobats built-in OCR tool or send up a request to use Humtech’s Luna for higher accuracy.

    1. Acrobat: Tools → Scan & OCR → Recognize Text

    2. HumTech Luna: email up to 5 documents at a time to ritc@humnet.ucla.edu

  4. Structure

    1. Use Headers and other formatting functions; these communicate order to a screen reader, they aren’t just for aesthetics

    2. Run Tagging within Acrobat: Prepare for Accessibility → Automatically tag PDF

    3. Tab Key for Accessibility: Press the Tab key to navigate through form fields, links, and interactive elements. The focus should move logically, generally from top-to-bottom and left-to-right.

    4. Verify Tab Order (PDF Settings): In Adobe Acrobat Pro, ensure the "Tab Order" in the Page Properties is set to "Use Document Structure" to ensure it follows the correct reading order.

    5. Reading Order Tool: Use the Reading Order tool (under Accessibility) to check how tags are structured.

  5. Use available tools- there are a number of tools provided by UCLA or freely available to help check the accessibility of your web content

    1. Ally Accessibility Tool- built-in accessibility tool on BruinLearn that will check all your content

    2. Siteimprove- register your site to have it scanned for accessibility on a frequent basis

    3. Kaltura- All media uploaded through Kaltura can easily have AI-generated captions added

    4. Screen Reader- test how a screen reader would “read” your document