Tutorial Best Practices

Digital Accessibility is a set of guidelines and best practices designed to ensure that digital information technology can be used by all — not just some people using particular technologies, but by all people using the range of technologies they need, prefer, or have at their disposal. When creating tutorials, online learning objects, and web content of any type it is important to follow these guidelines and best practices. 

Why it Matters

Digital Accessibility is a part of equitable access to information and creating an inclusive learning environment for people with disabilities, values we hold as a library.

Because the category of “people with disabilities” is extremely diverse — including folks with a range of sensory and physical capacities, using a range of different technologies and devices — digital accessibility principles focus on the “universal design” of digital information. This means designing digital information to be perceivable, operable, and understandable across all these differences.

As such, accessibility principles promote design that works better

• for a range of users with and without disabilities
• with the many technologies that interact with content
• in changing external circumstances

Digital content created without accessibility principles may result in barriers and inequities that are at odds with our values and obligations, including: ​

• content that is completely unusable for some groups of people
  • e.g. a video interview with no closed captions for Deaf or hard of hearing viewers
• content that is far more complicated on some devices
  • e.g. a web form that can be completed with three mouse clicks but requires dozens of keystrokes with other input technologies

Jump to a digital accessibility section:

• Headings, Links, and Lists
• Font and Color
• Images and Video

Accessibility Courses and Tutorials

• UNL Canvas Accessibility Course 
  UNL Canvas Accessibility Session is a five-module course covering text formatting, video formatting, color contrast, image accessibility, and quizzes. The course is tailored to Canvas features, but is useful for anyone creating accessible content.
• Center for Transformative Teaching (CTT) Accessibility & Universal Design for Learning Resource
  UNL Canvas  practical guide to accessibility of digital course materials at UNL such as Canvas course pages, PowerPoints, Word Documents, and more as well as a source of inspiration for using Universal Design for Learning. 
• Web AIM Accessibility Articles
• Teach Access Accessibility Tutorial
  Basic training on web accessibility with exercises and resources.
• Universal Design for Learning Framework
  Information from CAST on a framework designed to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all learners based on scientific insights into how humans learn.
  ​​

Accessibility Checkers

WAVE is a web accessibility evaluation tool developed by WebAIM.org. It provides visual feedback about the accessibility of your web content by injecting icons and indicators into your page. WAVE can identify many accessibility and Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) errors, but also facilitates human evaluation of web content.

• Wave for Chrome 
• Wave for FireFox 

Tota11y helps visualize how your site performs with assistive technologies. Their goal is to provide a tool that displays accessibility success and violations while educating on best practices. The tool is available as a bookmarklet that can be used on any web browser.