Accessibility Checklist

The following items are some accessibility best practices that are important to apply when creating content. Some of these practices may be slightly different based on the content you are creating, but it’s important to make sure accessibility is part of your process from the beginning!

Ensure Adequate Color Contrast

Whenever you create online or print material, make sure the colors you use have adequate color contrast. This means making sure there is a difference between the foreground color (like text) and the background color. Most color combinations from the USU Web Color Palette and the Brand Toolkit Colors are accessible as long as you pair a dark color with a light color. 

There are tools available that can help you check the contrast of two colors. Each of these tools will allow you to add colors to check their accessibility:

For more information, see the Color and Accessibility page on our website. 

Add Alternative Text to Images

Images can be a great way to share information, but without alternative text (alt text) they can be unusable for people who are blind or low-vision. Alt text is a brief description of the content of an image. For example, if I had a picture of Old Main, my alt text may be something like “USU’s Old Main in the winter.” Alternative text is also what renders on a website when an image isn’t able to load, so it helps everyone know what your image is! 

Both websites and social media platforms have places to add alt text for images. The alt text is usually hidden but can be accessed when selected or read aloud by a screen reader. For print materials, you may consider adding a short description by an image, but alternative text is mostly for online sources. 

For more information, see the Alt Text Basics on our website. There is also information about adding alt text for social media posts on our Social Media page. 

Note: If you get stuck, ChatGPT and other AI tools are doing a great job at creating alt text. Don’t hesitate to add an image to an AI tool and use the generated description as a starting point. Quite often, it will get you most of the way there!

Caption Any Video or Audio

Captions are the text representation of words and other important information in audio and video. They are synced with the video so that they are displayed as the words or sounds occur. Captions have many benefits and are often preferred by users! At Utah State, there is a standard that requires videos on YouTube channels, websites, and other platforms to have captions. To meet this standard, we have resources on captioning your videos manually or submitting them to our professional vendor. Whichever option you choose, we are here to help support you! If you need to get access to our account or need additional training, please let us know!

Use Descriptive Links

Links can be a helpful way to direct users to other resources. However, how we include those links can sometimes make it difficult for users. The best way to make links accessible is to use what are called descriptive links. This is where you attach the link to enough text that you can easily tell what the link is for. For example, if I wanted to direct you to our website page about link accessibility, I could say, “Find out more information about link accessibility on the USU Accessibility website.” It’s important that the link is attached to “link accessibility” instead of “find out more information” as that tells a user what the information is about.

Organize Content With Headings

A good heading structure helps users understand the layout and content of a website, document, or print material. It’s essential to screen reader users because it allows them to navigate the content using the headings. For example, headings are used in this document for each accessibility best practice. You may come back to this document and use the “Caption Any Video or Audio” heading to jump to that section. The same is true for screen reader users. They use headings to quickly navigate to the content they need. 

When using headings, heading levels should not be skipped, meaning you should go from Heading 1 to Heading 2 to Heading 3, rather than from Heading 1 to Heading 3. In other words, heading levels should be used as follows:

  • Heading 1: The document title or the main content heading. There should only be one Heading 1 per document.
  • Heading 2: A major section heading. 
  • Heading 3: A subsection of Heading 2. 
  • Heading 4: A subsection of Heading 3, and so on.
More detailed information can be found at our page dedicated to accessible headings.

General Resources

There are a few other resources that can help you make your content accessible! 

For Websites

  • WAVE Browser Extension: WAVE was built right here at Utah State, and will scan any page on a website for accessibility errors. If there are any errors, it will show in the tool!
  • Pope Tech: If you are a website owner or college webmaster, Pope Tech will show you all accessibility errors on your website.

For Documents

For Social Media

Social media has some unique challenges when it comes to accessibility. Many of the platforms do not have accessibility features built-in, but there are still some things we can do to make our posts more accessible! See Social Media Accessibility for more information.