Did you know that way back in 1999, the U.S. government established that ALL public and private school websites would need to be made web accessible, as in accessible to students with disabilities? If you didn’t, you’re not alone. Research shows that many schools are not in compliance with this directive (see the 1999 Journal of Special Education Technology Vol.24, number 2 for one example).
One quick way you can check your website for compliance is with Cynthia Says. Cynthia Says is fast, easy way to check how accessible your website is for users with disabilities.
From the Cynthia says main page, simply input the address of a website you want to test, and then click “Test your site”. Within seconds you’ll receive a report detailing what areas the site passed, what areas it failed, and in some cases the specific locations of areas that may need work.
For a more detailed explanation on how Cynthia Says works, there’s a video on YouTube you can watch for a demo.
For more information on how to make your website more accessible and what to look for before using a website with students, check out Project Enable’s“Evaluating Accessibility” page.
Bifocals & Buns had some areas that need improvement so I’ll be trying to address those as the site continues to expand and grow. What about you guys? Any plans to work on your site’s accessibility? Were you surprised with your site’s score? Share and share alike in the comments and I’ll see you all tomorrow.
During my Library Services for Students with Disabilities class last week we completed a simulation aimed at simulating the effects of cognitive overload on our students. During the simulation, we were simultaneously attempting to move a stick figure back and forth catching bombs and, searching for information on a website to complete a checklist of tasks. There were two levels to the simulation, easy and hard, and every time you dropped a bomb and failed to complete the tasks you had the option to slow the bombs down. Below is a screen shot of that simulation but I highly encourage all of you to follow this link and try the simulation out yourselves.
The goal of the simulation is to give participants a more thorough understanding of how frustrating it can be for students with an intellectual disability to complete a task. Several of my classmates admitted to giving up on completing the tasks and many of us (myself included) admitted that the only way we were able to complete both the easy and the hard level was to blindly click on the screens, without paying attention to the content, until we found the correct answer. Not a single person in class could provide more information about the website we were exploring in the simulation beyond, “it had something to do with penguins”. We could all see how students with intellectual disabilities could become frustrated with assignments and give up on them because, “I can’t do it and I’m not learning anything anyways.”
After sharing our frustrations and exploring how students with intellectual disabilities may feel when presented with distraction while working we brainstormed strategies that we, as school librarians, might be able to employ to make the library more accessible for our students with intellectual disabilities. One of the ideas was to download and install Readability on library computers.
What’s Readability you ask? Well allow me to fill you in: “Readability is a free reading platform that aims to deliver a great reading experience wherever you are” by turning “virtually any web page into a clean, comfortable reading view” (Readability.com, FAQ, 2012). To use Readability, you simply go to the website and download the Readability add-on. After downloading the add-on, you can change almost any webpage into a cleaner, easier to read page by clicking the readability add-on button. Here is a before and after example I took from the Today Show website:
The article about Twitter’s new profile page, before using Readability
Now, let’s look at that same page after running it through Readability’s add-on:
The same article, after using Readability
Ahhh, so much better. Using the Readability add-on makes the page cleaner, free of distractions, and allows the content to take center stage. So there you have it: a quick, free way to make websites easier on our students with intellectual disabilities. I’ll admit that I’m tempted to use it with all students just so they have less temptation to follow links and pay attention to things other than the assignment/task at hand.
Do you have any suggestions/strategies to make the library more accessible for students with intellectual disabilities?
Librarian On The Loose 