Online course provides the foundation you need to make your digital technology accessible

The courses listed below are intended to improve your understanding of IT accessibility, and Section 508 law, and help you produce digital tools and content that conform to the Revised 508 Standards.

In this course you’ll get hands-on experience making web applications accessible. You’ll understand when and why users need accessibility.

Expanding Non-discriminatory Access By Librarians Everywhere

The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) commitment to lead the web to its full potential includes promoting a high degree of usability for people with disabilities.

WAVE is a suite of evaluation tools that helps authors make their web content more accessible to individuals with disabilities. WAVE can identify many accessibility and Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) errors, but also facilitates human evaluation of web content.

The freeware program PAC provides a fast way to test the accessibility of PDF files. PAC supports both experts as well as end users conducting accessibility evaluations.

TPGi’s free color contrast checker tool that allows you to easily determine the contrast ratio of two colors simply using an eyedrop tool. The CCA enables you to optimize your content–including text and visual elements–for individuals with vision disabilities like color-blindness and low-vision impairments.

For Buffalo State College Faculty, Staff, & Students only. Access to the Adobe Acrobat Pro software.

NVDA allows blind and vision impaired people to access and interact with the Windows operating system and many third party applications.

JAWS, Job Access With Speech, is the world’s most popular screen reader, developed for computer users whose vision loss prevents them from seeing screen content or navigating with a mouse. JAWS provides speech and Braille output for the most popular computer applications on your PC. You will be able to navigate the Internet, write a document, read an email and create presentations from your office, remote desktop, or from home.

On your Mac, use the VoiceOver pane of Accessibility preferences to turn VoiceOver on or off, open VoiceOver Utility, or start the VoiceOver tutorial. To change these preferences, choose Apple menu > System Preferences, click Accessibility, then click VoiceOver.

The instructions provided here mainly relate to screen readers, with some information for keyboard only users. Resources were tested using JAWS and Internet Explorer, but should be useful for other screen readers and browsers.