Reflection 11.2: Accessibility

After a long hiatus due to a particularly dense stretch of assignments and projects in the teacher program, I’m back! And this time I’ll talk about accessibility and inclusion, exciting stuff am I right?

Blogging

After 4 years of writing lab reports and papers for my Physics degree,  I thought that any text I wrote had to be exact and analytical. I was under the impression that anything less than perfection meant that I wasn’t trying hard enough. Even the smallest mistake would unhinge the flow of my paper and it would be relegated to the realm of the inconsequential.

Enter blogging! A delightfully informal method of sharing my reflections on my experience in the teacher program that can be written in a far more authentic way. Finally, my writing can have some personality! But this has been quite the adjustment since I was used to writing stuff like this:

“It is acceptable to zero the microscope readout at arbitrary initial frequencies as we are only concerned with the slope of the relation between frequency and displacement..”

What in tarnation! This needs a serious overhaul if anyone other than my physics lab coordinator is going to get anything out of it.

Accessibility

Enter UVic’s Accessibility Guidelines. This handy little resource has suggestions for making your content more accessible for people with varying physical and cognitive abilities. For text, they recommend writing at a grade 6-8 level and to use bulleted lists to increase readability. They also mention using purposeful and well-organized headings so that people using readers can easily navigate your content.

They also suggest you use meaningful hyperlink text (like above) instead of click here which can be hard to interpret for those with audio readers. The rest of their guidelines suggest not using unnecessary images, using captions for the visually impaired, and embedding videos with closed captions and transcripts.