Accessibility Topics and Resources

Laws and Guidelines

According to the Chancellor's Office, web pages must satisfy Priority One checkpoints of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and conform to the standards for accessibility under Section 508 of the Rehabilitative Act of 1973.

Both state and federal law require community colleges to operate all programs and activities in a manner which is accessible to students with disabilities. Accordingly, as the system develops its capacity for creation of technology based instructional resources and the delivery of distance learning; it must proceed with the needs of all students in mind, including the unique needs of students with disabilities.

Distance Education: Access Guidelines for Students with Disabilities, August 1999
Chancellor’s Office California Community Colleges

 

Section 508
WAI Guidelines
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) General Information

From the Chancellor's Office

Alternate Media Access Guidelines
Distance Education Access Guidelines
508 Legal Opinion (Microsoft Word format)
Closed Captioning Legal Opinion (Microsoft Word format)

Tools, Techniques and Training

Web Evaluation Tools

http://www.cast.org/bobby, a free service provided by CAST to improve access for individuals with disabilities. To run your own reports paste in the URL for your page.

A-prompt is another free tool for Windows that actually guides you through the process of repairing pages. To use this tool you will have to download and install the application on your computer.

LIFT works with Dreamweaver and is a great tool for seamlessly integrating accessibility features into pages. This program is not free.
There are also many other tools available.

If you use an automated tool to evaluate your web pages, you should also manually check your pages. Automated tools are not capable of verifying all aspects of compliance. This checklist identifies items in order of Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Checklist (scroll down to view list)

The Disability and Educational Support Program Computer Lab has screen reading software installed. Faculty and staff who are interested in a demonstration of this software or who would like to listen to their pages using should contact the Disability and Educational Support Program.
A demo version of JAWS screen reader software is available for download. Download and install this demo to listen to your pages.
The final test in determining if a page is truly accessible is to access it using assistive technology.

Captioning

Saddleback College has purchased the CPC 700 system for the captioning of videos. For more information please contact Saddleback College's Alternate Media Specialist.
MAGpie is a free tool that can be downloaded and used to caption digital files.

PDFs

PDFs that do not have tags are not accessible. To make a PDF more accessible it needs to be converted into a tagged PDF. Document creator should also manually check the tagged part of the file to make sure that it accurately reflects the text of the main document.

There are two Adobe products Acrobat and Acrobat Reader. Acrobat Reader is only for reading files and will not create them. To create your own PDFs you will need to use Acrobat.

Make Accessible plug-in - This free download is for use with Adobe Acrobat 5.0 and will convert an untagged document to a tagged one. Double check the accuracy of the conversion especially in cases where you have complex page layouts and graphics. This product will only work with Adobe Acrobat. It will not work with Acrobat Reader.

Adobe's Online Tools for converting PDFs to text.
Adobe's Accessibility Site

Training

The High Tech Center Training Unit as De Anza College offers many trainings Alternate Media production and Assistive Technology.

These trainings are free and available to community college staff and faculty. - Sign up!

Please contact Saddleback College's Alternate Media Specialist, if you have questions about these resources or would like more information about accessibility.