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To make a project accessible means that anyone is able to access and use the information. The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) requires that public institutions meet specific standards to ensure equal access to services, programs, spaces, and employment.
This guide focuses on AODA standards for digital content. Along the left-hand side, you’ll see different resource types, and on each page, step-by-step instructions, as well as additional considerations, to help guide you in making your digital content accessible.
Accessibility recognizes the inherent dignity and independence of every person. By ensuring that a person can access and use digital content, we are creating equal opportunities to learn and engage with information.
Let’s forget about regulations for a moment. Instead, let's think about how barriers to accessibility can limit people’s ability to access content freely and easily.
As we revise or create new web content, here are four pillars of accessibility that can help us to centre people’s needs in design conversations.
To do this, people rely on different forms or modalities of information that suit their abilities. For example, Sam might use a screen reader which allows them to listen to the content of the page as it’s read aloud. To make this possible, content needs to be transformable to auditory format. The most easily transformable content is text based. For example, we can create descriptive transcripts that allow someone who is visually impaired to experience the visual content in a video. Also, text in the form of closed captions makes the audio content of a video intelligible to a person with a hearing impairment.
When people explore web content, they will use different tools (e.g., screen readers, text magnifiers, speech recognition software, etc.) to give them the best experience, and the fewest barriers. Some platforms and settings make exploring the web difficult and limit access to certain content
We need to make sure that:
People will use technologies that they prefer, that enhance their web experience, and that help them to access the information they are looking for. If we create barriers to content, this may prompt the person never to come back to our resources.
Source: Constructing a POUR website
Despite their best intentions, creators of digital content can produce barriers. Some examples of common barriers include:
This guide has been adapted from:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.