Where Your Wordle Post Went Wrong

Maybe you solved the day’s Wordle puzzle on your second guess and are dying to share your score. Or maybe you’re preparing a web presentation for your class or posting a video to hype your student club.

Without realizing it, though, you could be cutting people out of the fun, or making it significantly harder for them to get their work done.

Such everyday scenarios highlight the need to consider how a wide spectrum of people see, hear and experience online content, said Akosua (Kosi) Asabere, accessibility specialist in the University of Maryland’s Division of Information Technology.

“It’s really important that people understand what they can do to ensure that the doors are open,” she said. “A lot of people don’t think accessibility applies to them, but if you’re creating an event, sending an email, even sending a meme, writing a blog, creating a course, it all applies to you.”

That commitment to inclusivity will be the focus of tomorrow’s debut Digital Accessibility Empathy Lab, where Asabere and colleagues from the Office of Marketing and Communications and the Office of Diversity and Inclusion will discuss web accessibility awareness, fundamentals and testing, followed by an online scavenger hunt to pinpoint common oversights.

To prepare for the event, browse seven digital barriers and ways to eliminate them:

Relying on lectures with no visuals to teach a course or assigning quiz questions about an uncaptioned video could unintentionally isolate learners who absorb information in different ways.

Instructors can avoid this by providing students with multiple pathways to learn, collaborate and demonstrate their knowledge, like by using a combination of text, video, audio and images, and by assigning a variety of test items, presentations or projects. Referring to UMD’s Course Accessibility Checklist or Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology’s 20 Tips for Teaching an Accessible Online Course are good places to start.

We’ve all gotten emails or read online articles that direct us to “click here” for more information. But that lack of context can create confusion and frustration for those using screen readers, which are able to compile a list of all the linked text on a page.

“If you’re saying, ‘click here,’ ‘click here,’ ‘click here,’ the screen reader is not able to know where that link is going to take them, the meaning of that link, the content,” Asabere said. “It is like a guessing game.”

A little more info is all that’s needed. Wording like “Read UMD’s latest quantum news” or “Learn about the IDEA Factory” is much clearer.

Simply bolding or increasing the size of text might seem like an easy way to indicate subheads in an article or blog post. But relying on those “pseudo-headings” instead of using your content management system’s built-in feature to create headings can cause problems for screen readers.

“Someone who can see can see, for example, can scan a page and see what’s important, what stands out,” Asabere said. “But in order for someone who’s using a screen reader to do the same thing, it needs to be semantically marked up as a heading.”

Whenever possible, then, use the available page layouts and styles within platforms like Microsoft Office, Adobe and Canvas.