Accessibility: Unlocking Our Potential

[John Locke]

Whether we're teaching students, training staff, or creating resources to
share with our colleagues, understanding how to assure our Microsoft Word
and PDF documents are accessible is critical to our commitment to
Inclusion, Equity, and Diversity. There are resources available to help
ensure the documents you are sharing comply with ADA and other
accessibility-related regulations.

Deque University's *Document Accessibility Curriculum 1.0* is perhaps the
most comprehensive resource. It covers pretty much everything you might be
using to generate documentation from MS Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, to
Adobe Acrobat (PDF documents), and Adobe Indesign (publishing). As
mentioned in prior posts, Deque University <http://dequeuniversity.com/> is
*free* to all Plattsburgh staff and faculty. Simply log in with your SUNY
Plattsburgh email address, then click the "forgot password" link and create
a new password. And of course, we still have a few *Accessibility:
Unlocking Our Potential *t-shirts available for those who send their full
curriculum certificate of completion.

There are other resources available as well. For those faculty who scan a
chapter or two from a book using either Freinberg Library's KIC scanners or
other multi-use copier/scanners on campus, be sure to select the
"searchable text" option so that the resulting document isn't simply a
collection of images. *This step is critical* for those with vision or
cognitive impairments who use text readers.

   - View our two-minute video on using the Feinberg Library's KIC scanners
   <https://youtu.be/Uen1nkcSoW8> (be sure to catch the bit about choosing
   a searchable (OCR) layer at approximately 1:30).

Other tips for using scanners:

   - Hold the book as flat as possible. Curved pages translate poorly.
   - Before scanning, choose black and white rather than grayscale or color
   scanning settings. Optical Character Reader software works best with
   extremely high-contrast images.
   - If the scanner has a built-in OCR processor, choose it so that you
   won't have to perform that function later on.

More helpful videos:

   - Making Word documents accessible
   <https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/video-check-the-accessibility-of-your-document-9d660cba-1fcd-45ad-a9d1-c4f4b5eb5b7d>
(A
   collection of short videos from Microsoft that demonstrate correcting
   various issues common in many Word documents)
   - Making a PDF document accessible
   <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndNuOHeA4CI> (This is an excellent
   57-minute tutorial that covers everything you will need to assure PDF
   accessibility)
   - Making PDF forms accessible
   <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXfDNQuXYAo> (This 59-minute video is
   useful for those of us who are creating fillable forms as PDFs, which must
   also comply with accessibility standards)
   - Converting a PDF document to Word <https://youtu.be/N0hhaIo4eNE> (Our
   Accessibility intern, Bailey Dell'Erba produced this 4-minute video to
   demonstrate how to convert PDFs to Word documents, which are more
   compatible with some text readers)

Finally, while it is important for all faculty and staff to be able to
create accessible documents, we also realize that there is a backlog of
documents that may not comply. For assistance, please contact me
<jlock004 at plattsburgh.edu>, as interns in the Technology Enhanced Learning
Unit may be able to assist.
John Locke, P.h.D.
EIT Committee Chair
*Preferred Pronouns: he/him why
<https://nam05.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.glsen.org%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2FGLSEN%2520Pronouns%2520Resource.pdf&data=02%7C01%7CSarahjane.Dube%40uvmhealth.org%7C060af3d8eac04dc45f0308d7169299dd%7C5fc09f37dc5a489395c0ae3bb5ef18df%7C0%7C1%7C637002691227915932&sdata=yzCkpriTsruabX50zem9ShLf9Ln6ietI0vPorvfq958%3D&reserved=0>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://ls.plattsburgh.edu/pipermail/employee-digest/attachments/20211111/5a71c8df/attachment.htm>