NCDAE Accessibility Newsletter - October 2012
Featured Article: Evaluating your Institution's Web Accessibility Efforts: Part 1
Anyone who has ever been involved in system-wide change at a postsecondary institution is keenly aware that change takes time. Because of lengthy timelines, it is vital that institutions include periodic assessments of their process. This resource will walk you through a strategy intended to be useful in a process-based assessment of your institutional efforts for web accessibility.
http://ncdae.org/resources/tips/2012assessing.php
Evaluating your Institution's Web Accessibility Efforts: Part 2
Evaluating web content for accessibility requires an evaluation of both the process (your institutional work on web accessibility) and product (the accessibility of your web content). This resource outlines how to prepare for and conduct an evaluation of your institution's web content. While it may be tempting to jump straight into an evaluation, following these steps can help make your accessibility reporting process more effective.
http://ncdae.org/resources/tips/2012product.php
Accredibility: Using Your Web Accessibility Efforts as Evidence During Reaffirmation
GOALS staff has completed an analysis of the Principles, Standards and Criteria of the six regional accreditation commissions that oversee higher education in the United States.
GOALS Assessments Lead to Positive Change
GOALS staff are currently working on collecting cost case studies with diverse postsecondary institutions. The experiences shared by staff during focus groups at two participating institutions are shared below to illustrate the power of getting divergent individuals together to discuss institutional web accessibility. In these examples, those conversations resulted in significant change in practices and policy related to web accessibility for their campuses.
http://ncdae.org/resources/articles/2012tool.php
Featured Resource: NCDAE partner WebAIM releases WAVE 5 beta
WebAIM has announced that the latest version of WAVE, a web accessibility evaluation tool, is now available and can be used at http://five.wave.webaim.org/.
http://webaim.org/blog/wave5-beta-launch/
In the News
National Federation of the Blind Warns Educause about Inaccessible E-Text Pilots
Educause, in partnership with technology community Internet2, is announcing an e-text pilot initiative that would prevent blind and print-disabled students from fully participating due to accessibility issues.
Digital Humanities Address Accessibility Issues
The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the BrailleSC project are partnering with WordPress to create a plug-in to translate content into braille text.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/?p=42782?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en