A 5-Minute Accessibility Check You Can Do Today
Making your course more accessible can feel like a big undertaking. There are accessibility standards to consider, different types of content to review, and sometimes changes that take more than a few minutes to make.
But improving accessibility does not always have to start with a complete course review. There are also small things you can catch and fix as you work.
Try this: open one page, assignment, or module in your course and give yourself five minutes.
Here are a few things to look for.
Check Your Headings
Start by looking at how the page is organized. If you have different sections, are you using actual heading styles to identify them, or have you simply made the text larger, bold, or a different color?
Headings do more than visually break up a page. They give content structure and allow people using screen readers to navigate from one section to another more easily.
Quick fix: Look for section titles that have been manually formatted and apply the appropriate heading style instead. As you do, make sure your headings follow a logical hierarchy rather than jumping between heading levels.
Check Your Links
Next, scan your page for hyperlinks. Can students tell where each link will take them based on the linked words alone?
Generic phrases such as "click here," "read more," or "link" don't provide much information, particularly for someone using a screen reader to navigate through links on a page.
Instead of:
For the assignment instructions, click here.
Try:
Review the Research Paper Instructions.
Quick fix: Find one vague hyperlink and replace it with descriptive text that identifies the destination or purpose of the link.
Check How You're Using Color
Color can be a useful way to draw attention to information, but problems arise when color is the only thing communicating meaning.
For example, imagine an assignment page that tells students:
Assignments shown in red are required.
A student who cannot distinguish the colors may miss that information entirely.
Quick fix: Keep the color if it is helpful, but add another way of communicating the same information, such as a label, icon, or text.
The goal isn't necessarily to stop using color. It is to make sure students don't have to perceive the color to understand what you are communicating.
Take a Quick Look at Readability
Now step back and look at the page as a whole.
Is there a large block of uninterrupted text? Is some of the text unusually small? Are there places where bold, italics, underlining, or ALL CAPS are doing too much work? Is any text difficult to distinguish from its background?
Accessible content should also be easy to read and navigate.
Quick fix: Break up a particularly dense section, simplify unnecessary formatting, or adjust text that is difficult to read against its background.
Give It the Glance Test
Finally, don't read the page. Just look at it. Within a few seconds, can you tell what the page is about? Can you distinguish one section from another? Can you easily find what students are supposed to do?
This isn't a formal accessibility test, but it can reveal places where clearer structure and formatting could make the page easier to navigate.
Quick fix: If something important is buried, make it easier to find. Add a heading, break up a paragraph, create some visual separation, or make the next step more explicit.
Five Minutes Is Just a Start.