Choosing Your Learning Path

How to Navigate This Resource

To help you navigate to the information most relevant to your needs, we have colour-coded and labelled the technical content throughout the material as follows. Content that does not appear in coloured boxes is aimed at everyone.

Technical: Aimed more at web development staff. Typically contains HTML code samples.

Your Web Accessibility Toolkit

Throughout the content, we’ve also identified elements that should be added to the Web Accessibility Toolkit that you will be assembling as you keep reading. These elements will include links to resource documents and online tools used during activities, as well as software or browser plugins that you may need to install. These will be identified in a green Toolkit box, like the one below.

Toolkit: Provides useful tools and resources for your future reference.

Key Points

Important or notable information is highlighted and labelled in Key Point boxes such as the one that follows. These will include “must know” information, as well as less obvious considerations and interesting points.

Key Point: Highlights crucial information and interesting points.

Try This

Try This boxes contain activities designed to get you thinking or give you firsthand experience with something you’ve just read about.

Try This: Offers a short activity related to the topics being discussed.

Suggested Reading

Suggested Reading: Links to various web resources for optional reading on the topics being discussed.

WCAG Boxes

Principle

The W3C have defined four principles that define accessible web content. To be accessible, web content must be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust (POUR).

Principle: Fundamental tenets of web accessibility that must be met so that users with disabilities can fully engage with your content as intended.

Guideline

Under each principle are guidelines that detail how each principle can be addressed.

Guideline: Usability guidelines that web content creators should review to make their content accessible.

Success Criterion

Accompanying each WCAG guideline are success criteria that provide a detailed checklist of true or false statements for you to check your content against.

Success Criterion: A checklist of criteria to test your content against. Conformance to each are broken down to different levels of requirement (WCAG levels A, AA, and AAA).

General Tips

Here are some tips that will help you manage your time and get the most out of the material.

  • Set up a folder in your browser’s bookmarks/favourites area before reading, so that you can add links to tools and resources gathered for your Web Accessibility Toolkit.
  • Set regular study periods and stick to them.
  • You can skip ahead if you are able.
  • Before starting a unit, scan through it first to gather a general understanding of the topics covered.
Try This: Skip ahead to the end and read through the Content Recap for a high-level summary of the topics covered.

License

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Introduction to Web Accessibility Copyright © 2019 by The Chang School, Toronto Metropolitan University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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