Getting Ready for GAAD – Week 3

What is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)?

Featuring contributions from Jill Shacklock and Vedrana Velicovic.

Global Accessibility Awareness Day, taking place on 20th May, is an international event encouraging all people to think, talk, and learn about digital accessibility and inclusion. This is the third week in our ‘Getting Ready for GAAD’ blog post series where we invite staff and students to get involved through small, yet meaningful actions in support of accessibility.

We have a shorter post this week, as we have a follow-up post coming later in the week. This post will include information about a new tool to help with accessibility. We are also adding more videos to our YouTube channel and on TikTok this week. Please share these with colleagues and students.

Workshops/events next week…

Monday 10th May 1pm-2pm [Online workshop]
Making Accessible Word Documents
This session will take place on Microsoft Teams. Use join code 0isrmfj to access the team for this session (please note: join code starts with a zero).

Tuesday 11th May 12pm-1pm [Online event]
Fireside chat between University of Brighton’s Digital Learning Team and University of Sussex TEL Team. Sign-up to attend at the eventbrite page. This event is open to staff at both University of Brighton and University of Sussex.

Friday 14th May 1pm-2pm [Online workshop]
Making Accessible Word Documents
This session will take place on Microsoft Teams. Use join code 0isrmfj to access the team for this session (please note: join code starts with a zero).

Event on 20th May…

Thursday 20th May at 3pm [Online event].

Dr Kevin Merry from De Montfort University, giving a keynote talk: Institution-wide approaches to embedding accessibility. Sign-up to attend at the eventbrite page. This event is open to staff at both University of Brighton and University of Sussex.

Take action

There are lots of ways to take part in our celebration of GAAD. Even if you can only dedicate a little bit of time, every action helps… Even small ones.

Even small actions are meaningful

Small Tip for this Week:
Check the contrast between two colours. This is helpful in PowerPoint and Word for foreground text as compared to the background.

1. Here is a link to the WhoCanUse colour contrast checker
   As your content will most often be electronic and also online you should aim for the WCAG AAA grading result (as shown in the image below).

   

2. Find out the hex code for the colour that you are using in PowerPoint or Word from ‘Font color’ or ‘Shape Fill’ by clicking on ‘More Colors…’.

   

3. Then in the next window select the Custom tab. Copy the number/code starting with a ‘#’.
   Tip: #FFFFFF is for white and #000000 is for black. These are helpful as they are frequently used with different colours of background for text.

   

4. Steps as shown in the annotated image below:
   a. Set the font size as this is a factor that can affect how text functions on a background (take note, folks making posters!).
   b. Paste in the Hex code for the colour that you copied from PowerPoint or Word.
   c. Paste in the Hex code for the colour of your background or try out some colours using the sliders option to see what works and how that will be perceived.
   d. You can review your results on the right.

   

Quick changes to improve accessibility

How much time do you have?

• I have 5 minutes:
  • Watch this 3min video on LinkedIn Learning about Mental health accessibility
  • Watch this 3min video on LinkedIn Learning about more accessible Email
• I have 10 minutes:
  • This is one our favourite resources, from Lilian Soon at University of York – Making Equations Accessible. The guide include tips for PowerPoint, Word, and the web. It is helpful and concise, providing an overview of the options.
• I have 15 minutes:
  • Create a transcript for your Panopto video. This can be helpful for students who need notetaking support. The benefit of this format is that it is easy to use ‘find and replace’ in Word to correct interpretation errors made by the A.I. in Panopto.

For more tips, visit our S.C.U.L.P.T. Accessibility Guidance page.

Why is accessibility important?

Take a look back at the previous two weeks of posts (week 1 and week 2) for great examples of why accessibility is important. Thinking about the language that we use is also an important part of including people. We can alter the way that we write and the words we speak to support understanding, and we can also consciously reflect on the words we use. This week, Fiona recommends a thought provoking article by Sara Nović for the BBC about ableist language in everyday use. The article highlights a number of common phrases and synonyms where alternatives should be used. This is something that is helpful to consider with your colleagues or team, for instance when is the last time that you used the phrase ‘sanity check’? We thought about it in the Digital Learning team and decided not to use this phrase anymore, now we use ‘quality check’.

For a more in-depth read, Vedrana has recommended this book: Pedagogy, Image Practices, and Contested Corporealities (2018, Eds. Brophy and Hladki).

Take part

Pledge to make changes over the next month

You can sign up to the pledge on this page and see what other folks have pledged to do this month.

Essentially you are pledging to complete some good deeds, or rather #GAADDeeds this month! For those on Twitter, please consider sharing your pledge on Twitter, as Fiona did here (I got lots of love for it!). Here is an example of a #GAADDeed; a little thing, but still an important thing!

Attend the workshops and online events

As outlined in our events section at the top of this post. More details for the online events are to follow.

Join the Fix Your Content Day Challenge on 20th May

If you are an academic staff person or a professional staff person who creates resources for My Studies you can take part in our entry to this challenge on 20th May. The challenge is to improve as many documents as you/we can in My Studies on the 20th May. Thankfully, Blackboard Ally is here to help and provides guidance on exactly how to improve materials. Sign-up as an individual or as a team using this form.

Fix Your Content Day Challenge is a global competition with other universities using Blackboard Ally and you can see the leaderboard from last year here.