Archives: Accessibility

Wednesday, May 31, 2023

Web Accessibility and Screen Readers: A Conversation with Rebecca Jackson

From May 28 to June 3, it's National AccessAbility Week, which is dedicated to celebrating disability inclusion and accessibility in Canada! In today’s digital age, the importance of web accessibility cannot be overstated. As we strive for inclusivity, it becomes imperative to understand the experiences of those who rely on assistive technology... More

Friday, May 26, 2023

5 Common Web Accessibility Issues

Accessibility! Accessibility! Accessibility! Here at Web Services, you may notice we chat often on this topic, though that is only because it plays such a key role in the web world. Across the Carleton domain, we want to ensure everyone has the same user experience. Below are five common accessibility issues found on websites.... More

Friday, February 24, 2023

Low Vision Awareness Month and the Need for Web Accessibility

February is Low Vision Awareness Month! According to the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB), an estimated 1.5 million Canadians have some form of significant vision loss. Low vision encompass a broad range of experiences that may change the way the individual interacts with the web. At Carleton University, we strive to be... More

Friday, February 17, 2023

Scantastic news for accessible websites

As we have said before, the community of people who maintain websites at Carleton (that’s you!) is great at being supportive and proactive about accessibility. To maintain this momentum, we are offering to scan websites for accessibility, to check for any errors in our template or your content. How we assess accessibility There are... More

Wednesday, February 8, 2023

Request a Scan!

As we often tell people, Carleton has a web community that is totally committed to accessibility. When we attend webinars and conferences online on the subject, we often hear that in other web communities across North America people have to be persuaded to integrate accessibility into the content they create. At Carleton what we... More

Friday, December 23, 2022

Keeping Tabs on Tabs

Does anyone remember Tab Cola? It was produced by Coke, and was available between 1963 and 2020. It was the first diet soda Coke produced. Its name was chosen by the company’s recently acquired IBM 1401 computer (although it preferred spelling the name with a double ‘b’ – this second 'b' was removed by... More

Friday, December 2, 2022

Describing People in Alt Text

Let’s talk about people I used to live in a small village in rural Nova Scotia. There was no longer a bank in the village because the last branch had been robbed several years ago. The bank, feeling it could no longer secure its money, shut up shop. The perpetrators were never caught. Nova... More

Tuesday, November 29, 2022

Captivating Captions: Examples of Captioning and its Uses

Examples of captions doing what they should do In our recent post Captivating Captions, we looked at why captioning videos is so important for accessibility and many other reasons. Now we are going to examine some video captions (as opposed to just subtitles) to show what these actually do. One of the most important... More

Friday, November 25, 2022

Captivating Captions: Why We Use Captions on Videos

Video captioning is a crucial aid to a lot of people, especially those with particular disabilities. We produced a news story earlier this year to tell you how to add captions to all your videos. However, we think it is also important to understand what captions are and why we use them. Captions or... More

Friday, November 11, 2022

Topics in Accessibility: Lightening the Cognitive Load

What is cognitive load? Cognitive load is the amount of working memory your cognitive processor (you might refer to this as your brain) has to use to understand information and act on it. Cognitive load is generally lessened by use of schema, or patterns of thought/action, that make it easier to recall and reproduce that thought/action.... More

Thursday, August 25, 2022

Accessibility Training Behind the Scenes and Bloopers That Were Too Good Not to Share

If you have recently explored the Web Services Web Workshops page, you may have noticed a new training has appeared in the sidebar. Over the past few months, my fellow co-op, Charlie, and I have created a self-guided accessibility training intended to teach website editors current accessibility best practices in web design. If you... More

Monday, April 18, 2022

Making Accessibility Accessible

Great news everyone! In recent history, Web Services has been delivering training around accessibility for the web in our Writing for Web Accessibility workshops. Now we have moved a set of the materials upon which we base our workshops into our website. So now you can learn even more about how to present your web... More

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