Accessible Communication

Overview

Ensure that documents, posters and presentations you create are accessible to everyone in your intended audience, including people with disabilities.

ABET Requirement

This competency meets the ABET requirement that you demonstrate:

An ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences

Best Practices for Documents

Here are some best practices. Those listed in bold are required. It may be helpful to review these resources on making slides accessible and on presenting accessibly

Avoid visual clutter (use Sans serif fonts for digital viewing)
Required: Use headers appropriately and nested correctly (H1, H2, H3)
Required: Use proper color contrast
Required: Write alt text for all non-decorative photos, diagrams and videos
Use meaningful hyperlink text Good example: check out this class’s syllabus; Bad examples: check out this class’s syllabus here; check out this class’s syllabus: /courses/cse482a/26au
Properly mark up tables
Screen reader order is correct (in documents where it applies, such as PowerPoint)
Videos on slides are captioned
Font sizes are large enough (above 20 ideally for slides; above 11 for documents)
Font sizes are large enough (above 20 for slides; above 11 for documents)

Guidance these best practices is available for major platforms including Microsoft Products and Google Products. In this class, we are asking you to use Microsoft products because they have a built in automated accessibility checker. You can get Microsoft 365 through UW IT.

Rubric for this Competency

Excellent: Demonstrates positive examples of all required guidelines for the document type; images have ALT text; is complex enough to demonstrate almost all relevant guidelines; violates no guidelines.
Competent: Demonstrates positive examples of a small number of guidelines; violates no guidelines.
Not Competent: Follows only a few guidelines

Typical Handin for this Competency

Your document as required by the assignment. Note: do not submit a PDF. We expect your submission to be a Word or Google Doc in most cases.
A list of images and the ALT text you wrote for each of them
Which best practices are demonstrated in this document
A screen shot showing the accessibility checker results for your document