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Re: Making Content Accessible to Sighted Users?

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From: Karlen Communications
Date: Oct 6, 2016 6:30AM

Along time ago I taught both a community college course in WordPerfect (see, long time ago) and a course for people who were blind or visually disabled on how to use WordPerfect. The final project for both groups was to create a newsletter complete with masthead, images (there was no Alt Text back then), columns and so forth...everything a newsletter should have.

When you put the newsletters from both groups side by side you couldn't tell who did or didn't have a disability.

I taught the principles of good design and provided keyboard commands and information on colour, colour contrast, concepts of newsletters...everything someone would need to create a well structured newsletter.

For those who were blind or who had colour deficits, we worked collaboratively and the "rule" was that you got someone to check over your work to make sure the colours were good and the layout was what you described to them....but if things were off, it was up to you, not the person reviewing your work for those types of thing, to fix it.

This worked well in both classes and I see no reason that, when taught good design and accessible document design and how to use the authoring environment and their adaptive technology that someone who is blind or visually disabled cannot create accessible digital content and environments like anyone else. Work should be reviewed for the more esthetic things like colour contrast and anything that looks off but the person who creates the content/software should be the one to remediate it because then they learn how to make better content/software.

Cheers, Karen