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Table Of Contents:

About Accessibility

Web accessibility refers to how easily people with disabilities can navigate and interact with websites. Disabilities may be physical (such as blindness, low vision, deafness, or fine motor skills difficulty), or cognitive (such as dyslexia or attention deficit disorder). People with disabilities often use assistive technologies to help them navigate the web. An assistive technology is any device that helps a person with a disability. Common web assistive technologies include modified mice and keyboards, screen readers and screen magnifiers.

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Screen Reader Accessibility Features

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• Standard page designs. Similar functionality is located in the same place and accessed in the same way across tools.

• Simple heading structure. Heading 1s are used for page titles. Heading 2s are used for widgets and major page sections. Heading 3s are used to organize information within widgets and for subsections.

• Title attributes on links that “open in a new window”. We recommend that you adjust your assistive technology’s settings to read the title attribute when different from link text if you want to be warned when a link opens in a new window.

• Descriptive alternative text on all system images and graphics. Learning Environment also prompts course designers to include alternative text when uploading images.

• Full keyboard accessibility. The tab order is logical and tab focus visually indicated. Drag-and-drop and other Web 2.0 designs have keyboard alternatives.

• Support for browser and assistive technology scaling and contrast options. System content uses styles that can be overwritten by cascading style sheets (CSS), although the complexity of the system requires detailed style sheets.

Keyboard Only Navigation Tips

This topic provides some basic advice for people who navigate the Learning Environment using a keyboard or assistive technologies that emulate a keyboard.

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Screen Magnifiers, Zooming, and Colour Contrast Tips

Screen magnifiers, zooming functionality and colour contrast functionality are often used by people who have difficulties reading online. Difficulties can include low vision, colour blindness, eye strain, or dyslexia. Screen magnifiers and zooming functionality are also used by individuals who have fine motor skills difficulty as they increase the target for selectable content (such as links, icons and form fields).

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• To increase the system font size, select the Account Settings option from the drop-down menu by clicking on your name in the upper right-hand corner of any LEARN page.  This only increases the size of system fonts, it does not increase the size of icons and other graphics or user-created content.

• Use an assistive technology or browser that supports zooming. This increases the magnification of the entire page. This option works well in Learning Environment, except for courses that use legacy navigation bars, as images and navigation panels resize well.

• Use a screen magnifier to magnify a portion of the page, such as the area around the cursor. Many users like screen magnifiers because they preserve the layout of the page, but allow you to focus on the content in a specific area.

University of Waterloo Resources and Additional Help

Persons with disabilities often use adaptive/assistive technologies that require an alternate format for the technology to access course content. 

If you require an alternate format to access LEARN content to lessen the impact of your disability, please register with AccessAbility Services. Contact AccessAbility Services at access@uwaterloo.ca for more information.

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