Starting today (March 15), the University of California, Berkeley, will begin removing more than 20,000 video and audio lectures from public view as a result of a Justice Department accessibility order that found the university to be in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990.
According to a story in Inside Higher Ed, the Justice Department "reached that conclusion after receiving complaints from two employees of Gallaudet University, saying Berkeley’s free online educational content was inaccessible to blind and deaf people because of a lack of captions, screen reader compatibility and other issues."
The Justice Department ordered Berkeley to make the content accessible to people with disabilities. However, since its ruling specifically addressed public content and did not address content intended for students, faculty or staff with disabilities, Berkeley chose instead to remove everything from public view. The information will remain available in its current format to those who sign in with University of California credentials.
The ruling against Berkeley is similar to an agreement Penn State reached with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) in 2011, after the NFB filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, over electronic information technology (EIT) accessibility for those with sight-loss. The complaint against Penn State dealt with electronic resources for use by students, faculty and staff.
As a result of the agreement, Penn State has made a good-faith effort to ensure all documents, videos and websites are accessible before being used to "conduct core University academic and business activities." The information technology systems covered include course management systems, websites, classroom technology, library resources, banking services and more.
Policy AD69 establishes standards for the accessibility of EIT considered necessary to meet this goal and ensure compliance with applicable local, state and federal regulations and laws, including Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. According to the policy, an electronic document or website is accessible "when a person with a disability is afforded the opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as a person without a disability in an equally effective and equally integrated manner, with substantially equivalent ease of use."
Policy AD25 covers video accessibility, and states, "synchronized audio must be closed-captioned (including those videos posted by units to Internet-based services like YouTube)."
Most Word and PDF documents fail accessibility tests because of the use of extra spaces, extra tabs, extra line-breaks and other repeating characters, instead of using styles to control the formatting. Screen readers for people with sight loss cannot easily process text when it has all of these repeating items. Use of heading styles instead of manually adjusting text to make it stand out as a heading will enable screen readers to "scan" the document by reading the headings to jump to specific content. Without formatted headings to guide the screen reader, users must read the entire contents of a document to find the information a sighted person can find by scanning headings.
Another common accessibility issue is the lack of alternative text (alt-text) attached to photos, logos, graphics and other visual additions to the document, for use by screen readers to describe the visual content. These are easy to add in Word documents, whether using the software on Mac or Windows.
Penn State's Accessibility and Usability website has numerous resources available for faculty, staff and students, including an Accessibility Checklist. Accessibility training also is available through the University's subscription to Lynda.com.