A colouring book of accessiblity

Doing CMALT section 3 – wider context, the section that is all about legislation and policy, has brought a number of things based around good practice to the front of my mind, things that would have been thought about in purely abstract terms if at all. One of those things is web accessibility and what it actually means.  I have been guilty of ignoring such things or just relying on the fact that I am working within a VLE or in within the Imperial website so it must all be ok. I guess this has been true partly because I have always had other things to occupy my mind and partly because it has never really come up having trained as a teacher I know all about making work accessible to diverse groups of students and some of that translates into on-line materials. Making things accessible to different learning styles is second nature to me but I have never formally investigated the rules or protocols of web accessibility. Doing my CMALT portfolio has however made me think a bit more in depth about this.

Recently I have been updating a set of sharepoint pages and I was asked if I could put some colour in them. Then jokingly – because the person who asked is also doing CMALT – said ‘ I wonder if that will make it inaccessible’. This was a question I realised I did not actually know the answer to so I thought I would do a bit of research and it was actually quite interesting.

Once I got past the WCAG guidelines that definitely fail on their own rule of language accessibility and found some sites that have been dumbed down a bit (clearly I needed an idiots guide) I discovered that colour – in and of itself – does not make that much difference to people who have impaired vision however contrast and an awareness of it can make a big difference to the useablity of a site.(read article here) Then I found this cool online tool which gives you a rating for how good your colour scheme is.

After I had played with it for about 10 minutes just putting in colours to see what happened (it is quite good fun) I worked out which of the colours from the Imperial palette would give me an AAA rating and used those to add some colour to my sharepoint pages. 

Now I am excited and want to put coloured backgrounds on everything!