Accessibility

Johns Hopkins School of Nursing aims to ensure that newly authored content consistently meets industry accessibility standards, specifically Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.  While the WCAG 2.1 standards are an authoritative source of information about compliance, our initial guidance will focus on selected areas. These guidelines improve teaching and learning for everyone by providing alternate and complementary versions of content.

The Instructional Design, Technology and Course Support teams are focusing on the following WCAG 2.1 accessibility areas:

Templates

Ensure that all offices generating content are using a consistent set of templates (Word, PPT, etc.), that are designed with the recommended contrast ratios, alt text for images, accessible fonts, headings, and logical reading order and are compatible with screen reader software. Please use the approved document templates on the Teaching Resources site. Use the IDT PowerPoint template for academic courses, and other templates are available for external use on the Marketing & Communications Services SharePoint site.

Alternative Accessible Formats

Provide students with alternative accessible formats for accessing the content of video and audio presentations.  Post slide presentations, transcripts, and descriptions alongside video and audio content. For any content in Ally provides some of these alternatives automatically. We recently adopted Ally, a tool for assessing content accessibility and automatically providing alternate versions of content to learners within the learning management system.

Captioning of Videos

Incorporate captioning into all synchronous (Zoom/Teams) and asynchronous (Zoom recordings) video production processes. These tools are already provided or soon will be in our supported video platforms. Captioning services are available through multimedia, instructional design, and course support specialists. Currently, our Zoom and Microsoft Teams instances offer automated transcriptions for recordings, and Teams offers automated live captioning. We provide human generated transcripts and captions for videos in all planned course developments, modifications, and revisions.

e-Reserves

Request course readings through eReserves rather than posting scanned PDFs, as AFL can protect against copyright violations and use accessible version when available.

Alt Text

Incorporate addition of “alt text” into all document production processes at the platform or document level, in addition to sourcing all images and videos. Instructions and resources will be posted shortly.

Images

Avoid the use of images of text without descriptions. Also, avoid the presentation of data that relies solely on color.

Websites

Schools should only deploy sites that meet web accessibility standards as defined by a score of 70-100 on a SiteImprove audit. Site administrators can request access to their website in SiteImprove by sending an email to [email protected] and specifying the URL of their website. Reports of barriers or difficulty accessing a university platform/website should be sent via email to webaccessibility.jhu.edu.

Accessibility Resources