Digital Accessibility Awareness [Online]

Course Code: DCU207

This workshop is aimed at all staff in all types of roles as accessibility has a role for all to partake in as DCU has a diverse staff and student population and accessibility skills and awareness helps us all to contribute to an inclusive environment. 

The overall aim is to introduce staff to digital accessibility. The arc of the session will explain digital accessibility, how it affects staff and students and how we can all play a part in creating accessible content to benefit all student, all staff and ourselves.

Whatever your role is in Education, accessibility awareness and skills are easy to begin to adopt into your everyday life.

The session will also involve the demonstration of accessibility skills that can be adopted for everyday practices. These will focus on a Word document and explore:

• Heading styles – document hierarchy
• Use of Alternative text for images (or Alt Text for short)
• Font styles – San serif fonts
• Use of bullet points
• Creating Accessible Tables
• Adding hyperlinks to text – there is a skill to this task.
• Colour contrast
• Navigation Pane and its purpose
• Accessibility Checker in Word

These skills can not only be key to making Word documents accessible but can be transferrable skills to PowerPoint and Web based information also.

Self-study

Explore the Google Workspace Learning Centre and become more familiar with the functionality on offer and how best to utilise the suite of tools.