Graphics & Colour Blindness

Approximately 5 – 10% of the student population are likely to experience some form of colour blindness.

A useful free tool to assess contrast and colour combinations for your website and digital documents is Color Oracle, a colour blindness simulator for Window, Mac and Linux. It takes the guesswork out of designing for colour blindness by showing you in real time what people with common colour vision impairments will see (taken from Colororacle.org).

Writing Alternate Text for Images

Writing descriptive yet concise alternate text is actually harder than it sounds. But it’s an important skill in rendering images accessible to students with a visual disability. WebAIM has a great primer on the appropriate use of alternate text:

WebAIM’s guide to writing alternate text

Check out Algonquin College’s simple and concise instructional video on how to apply alt text to images in Microsoft Suite, including how to format charts and graphs to be accessible for screen-reader technology.