Digital Accessibility

Accessibility Guidelines 

We have a new federal requirement to make our digital content accessible. 

This includes all programs, services, and instructional materials delivered digitally. Compliance must align with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA. 

Communications

This is typically done via listserv or by posting news/events to the website. The most important thing to keep in mind is DO NOT post an image with text in it, unless you provide alt text. That is, you right click the image, select “Add alternate text," and include the text from the image. This text is easier than ever to extract, as you can upload the file to AI and ask it to give you the alt text. The best practice comes down to one of two things:

  1. Include regular text in your message, or
  2. Include the image, but provide alt text

PDFs

By default PDFs are not accessible. They can be made accessible, however, with Acrobat, via the "Make Accessible" tool. If you are the content manager of a section of the website, you'll need to make your PDFs accessible by doing one of two things:

  1. Make the PDF instead into a web page, or
  2. Make the PDF accessible

How to fix your PDF

Request access to Ally, the UGA-licensed software that scans our content and reports on it. Ally will tell you what's wrong and how to fix it. You can either use Ally for Web for any web-hosted PDF, or request access to our eLC course that allows you to upload and review individual documents using Ally for eLC. 

Contact Jimmy Hansen for Access

How to make your PDF into a web page

This comes down to creating a new entry in Expression Engine and pasting your PDF's content into it.

  1. Open Expression Engine and go to Create > (your channel)
  2. Define fields:
    1. Page Title
    2. Hierarchy + Title (same as #1)
    3. Body
  3. Save
  4. Review at www.fcs.uga.edu/(yourchannel)/(URL Title)
    • yourchannel is the web name for your channel. Go to any web page in your channel to see what it is. e.g., hdfs, otis, chdd, about, faculty_staff_resources.
    • URL Title can be found at the top of the entry you just created.
  5. Edit Body, save, review as needed

Extracting text from your PDF to paste into Body

This is the hardest part. But luckily AI has made it easier. If you simply copy and paste text from a PDF into any text box, the results won't be great. But AI can help.

  1. Go to your favorite AI, upload the PDF, and prompt it with, "Output this into basic HTML"
  2. In Expression Engine, go to the Body field, click the "Source" icon to the far right of the toolbar, and paste that HTML
  3. Save and review

Why you're doing this: Structure

There are lots of barriers to accessibility in a PDF, but a major focus is structure. Headings should be defined as headings, lists should be formatted lists, and so on. In other words, text needs to be standardized so that assistive devices like screen readers can accurately convey that to their user.

So whether you format this in your PDF with the "Make Accessible" tool, or you're making a web page, the same thing happens: structure is defined by tags.

This is called semantic design: defining by meaning, not appearance.

Moving Forward

The best practice is to make your document right to begin with, which will save lots of time down the road. These UGA tutorials will help.

UGA DASH Resources

CAES Resources

Contact

Jimmy Hansen

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