Five Steps to an Accessible Classroom Website

The article “Five Steps to an Accessible Classroom Website” starts by saying that a teacher’s web site has to be accessible for all the students, that mean that students with all kind of disabilities have to be able to navigate the website.

Then she provides with the steps needed to have a web site accessible for all the students:

1. Organization- It is important to create a consistence structure in the website. To avoid large webpages that require horizontal scrolling, that will allow visitors with browser windows of different sizes. Here she mentions the importance of avoiding colors such as green and red, because we can have students with color blindness.

2.- To create a webpage that can be use without a mouse to facilitate the navigation from a computer without a mouse.

3.- She suggest that all the images should have a text that explains them. That will allow the students that need a screen reader to be able to access the website. She also suggests that the audio features should include caption.

4.- It is a good idea that the text that takes you to a link should have information regardless to the link and not just things like “click here”.

5.- There are programs that evaluate the accessibility of a website. A final check should include: to try to navigate without a mouse, with the sound off, with a smaller windows in the browser, with the images turn off, with a gray scale scheme color.

This article was written in 2009, it is a little dated. I think that now we can consider that everybody has a mouse and a color monitor, but still there are students with disabilities, so it is a good idea to create websites that allows them accessibility. At the end she gives a list of the standard that makes a website accessible. Now that we are learning how to make a webpage and that we are building our teacher webpages it is a good idea to follow that list. It is a good way of learning how to make thing right from the beginning. 

Reference:

Amundson, L. (2009, November). 5 Steps to an Accessible Classroom Website. Learning & Leading with Technology, 37 (4). Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/learn/publications/learning-and-leading/digital-edition-november-2009.aspx