All, We got the note below from our college president today. What does anyone know about making context and pdf accessible to student with vision problems? Dear Colleagues: We have an obligation and a commitment to full accessibility to our courses and programs for students with disabilities. By sending this memo, I want to inform you that effective immediately, and in adherence to College of the Redwoods Board of Trustees Policy No. 809 Administrative Regulation 809.07, specifically Part III of the Policy Statement "Access to Electronic and Information Technology" http://www.redwoods.edu/district/board/policies/ar/AR80907.Htm , all instructional web pages and Blackboard postings must meet Level 1 accessibility standards as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act Part 1194.22. These standards are primarily concerned with the construction of electronic documents including web pages and the readability of those documents by assistive technology used by students with disabilities including students who are low vision or blind. In designing online instructional documents for your courses, please ensure that they meet the specific requirements for accessibility compliance found in both of the following: W3C Checklist http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/full-checklist.html and Section 508 Checklist http://www.webaim.org/standards/508/checklist Faculty web page authors may also access the staff of the Center for Teaching Excellence for guidance and assistance in web page and Blackboard development. Additional online information can also be found by visiting the http://hightech.redwoods/accessibility/ Using these resources, each of us can ensure the accessibility of our course materials. Thank you so much for your attention to this important matter- Casey
At 10:03 PM 9/2/2005, David Arnold wrote:
We got the note below from our college president today. What does anyone know about making context and pdf accessible to student with vision problems?
I don't know that much offhand. However, with web pages, one of the simpler ways of testing compatibility with screen-readers is using lynx to view the file; I'd think that using one of the pdf-to-text converters on the pdf file would do about the same for .pdf files. It's not a perfect test by any means, but it's a good first start. Given that the TeX->PDF->text pathway is often recommended for getting text out of TeX documents, I suspect it's likely to be reasonably ok. - Brooks
participants (2)
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Brooks Moses
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David Arnold