{"id":5401,"date":"2018-11-06T14:45:10","date_gmt":"2018-11-06T19:45:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/?p=5401"},"modified":"2018-11-08T11:51:01","modified_gmt":"2018-11-08T16:51:01","slug":"a-few-minutes-to-learn-something-cool-universal-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/2018\/11\/06\/a-few-minutes-to-learn-something-cool-universal-design\/","title":{"rendered":"A few minutes to learn something cool \u2026 Universal Design"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week Sheryl Burgstahler, the founding Director of DO-IT*\/Accessible Technology Services and Outreach at the University of Washington was on campus promoting Universal Design. (<\/span>if interested you can listen to her talk available here<\/span><\/a>) \u00a0Universal Design is a concept from Architecture that is increasingly applied in Education to suggest that we should design course materials, activities and documents to be accessible to the broadest possible group of people. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There are a few simple things you can do and watch for to make your documents Accessible to a broad audience.<\/span><\/p>\n

When creating a document in Word, Pages, or Google Docs, make sure to use styles for headings, paragraphs, list, tables etc and add text descriptors for image content that convey meaning. Do not add any descriptors to eye-candy. \u00a0If possible post the document in the original format and avoid converting to pdf, or another format. You\u2019ll often lose features that make a document accessible in the conversion process.<\/span><\/p>\n

With pdf files, be sure your document contains text (not just an image of text) before posting or scanning. \u00a0A quick check is to try copying\/pasting text from the document. If you can\u2019t select text typically the document is an image. \u00a0New departmental copiers\/scanners should be set to convert images to text (through a process known as OCR or Optical Character Recognition). \u00a0Older documents may not have benefited from this. When scanning:<\/span><\/p>\n