Tools and Techniques for Accessible Web Content: A Promising Practice in Webcast Training

Dr. Jon Gunderson, Director of IT Accessibility Services at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Campaign, provided a web accessibility training event to postsecondary staff and faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus. The Tools and Techniques for Accessible Web Content event shared best practices and reviewed accessibility management and visualization tools used to improve the design and verification of the functional accessibility of web resources. After the event Dr. Gunderson had the webcast of the presentation along with a written transcript archived on the UW–Madison website.

The training, which was offered live and via webcast, consisted of two sections:

Part One: Illinois Accessible Web Publishing Wizard. The Illinois Accessible Web Publishing Wizard for Microsoft Office provides a simple way to create highly accessible and standards-compliant web versions of Office documents that are more accessible and usable by everyone, including people with disabilities.

Part Two: Functional Accessibility Evaluation Tool (FAE). The Functional Accessibility Evaluation Tool (FAE), formerly called the Web Accessibility Management Tool (WAMT), addresses HTML best practices for development of functionally accessible web resources that also support interoperability.

This promising practice, in offering professional development training and archiving the materials to allow continued access, was the result of a multi-institutional partnership. The event was sponsored by the MIDWEST Alliance and the UW–Madison's Division of Information Technology (DoIT). It was funded in part with an AccessComputing minigrant.

AccessComputing minigrant activities have been funded by the National Science Foundation as part of the Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) program of the Directorate for Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE) (grant #CNS-0540615, CNS-0837508, CNS-1042260, and CNS-1539179).