Accessibility is important and beneficial for everyone. It is always good practice to consider how your resource might be used by people with visual impairment, dyslexia, mental health conditions or other special requirements and it is important to understand that applying good accessibility practices consistently throughout the resource has the potential to help all learners using the resource.
Providing alternative format options, alternative text, checking colour contrast, content resizing, content structure, form labels, language of page, link text, keyboard navigation, captions, skip links, transcriptions of any video or audio resources and captioning of video resources are all needed to make your resource accessible to as many people as possible.
Learners who have no disabilities find alternative formats useful, depending on the context in which they are learning. For example, transcripts can help students follow a video/audio and make notes more easily.
All images you use in your resource will need long descriptions so screen reader software being used by learners who have visual impairments can tell them what is included in the image. For example:
It is best to write long descriptions for images as you are authoring a course and choosing images to use, to avoid a last-minute panic before publishing. Ideally images need to have captions (with attribution information if the image is not yours). The Asset register template has a column for long descriptions.
All text should be formatted consistently, so pages of content do not look messy and hard to read, which happens if a variety of fonts, text sizes and font colours is inserted into a page from various sources. Use formatting styles or edit the text in html mode as good accessibility practice. Screen reader software will use the html formatting when navigating and reading a page out loud.
When you copy and paste text from other software such as Word, some hidden formatting code is carried over but might not be compatible with Moodle, so the following practice will help you avoid hidden formatting code issues and provide more consistently formatted text and tables:
Transcripts, captions and subtitles make video and audio files more accessible to people with visual and hearing impairments. See embedding a video, adding an audio file and adding a transcript. Video editing software has the functionality to add subtitles and captions. These should also be included in the transcript.
Video and audio files with music soundtrack playing while a voice is speaking may not be accessible for those with hearing impairments, it is harder to absorb spoken information through a continuous musical soundtrack, especially if the music is loud. Therefore, if you add it, use background music sparingly so it enhances rather than overwhelms the message being conveyed.
It is advisable to test your resource is accessible before you attempt to publish it. This platform has a publication authorisation stage, and we will not publish resources which are not accessible.