EIT Learning Resources

Guides to Making Accessible Documents

• DIAGRAM Center’s Guide to Creating Effective Alternative Text Descriptions — Contains many examples for creating high-quality alternative text descriptions for scientific diagrams, graphs, maps, artwork, and mathematical equations.
• George Mason University’s Guide to Creating Accessible Electronic Materials — Contains step-by-step instructions for creating accessible PDF, Word, and PowerPoint documents, including guidance for embedded equations. Also includes guides for accessibility in Blackboard and YouTube.

Guides to Making Accessible Technology

• University of Washington DO-IT Guide to Accessible Technology — An extensive list of tutorials and guides for creating accessible technology both inside the classroom and in fully online environments.
• Penn State Accessibility — An extensive guide to creating accessible documents and technology. Includes step-by-step guides for captioning and making accessible maps, graphs, and equations.

Guides to Meeting WCAG 2.0 Level AA Requirements

• WCAG 2.0 Level AA Guidelines — The internationally recognized accessibility standard to which most websites are held.
• How to Meet WCAG 2.0 Requirements — An exhaustive reference for meeting WCAG 2.0 guidelines, includes many examples of both success and failure scenarios and how to remediate them.
• whucag.com Checklist — An excellent, human-readable guide to making your website fully compliant with WCAG 2.0 Level AA guidelines.

U.S. Government Guides to Accessibility

The United States government has been required to create accessible documents and technology for more than three decades under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

• section508.gov — Answers questions about the legal requirements of Section 508 and provides guides to accessible procurement.
• CIO Council Accessibility Community of Practice — The federal government’s best practices community for accessibility. Much of the checklist for creating accessible documents was derived from their work on this topic.
• Department of Education Accessibility Guides for Electronic Documents — The Department of Education’s guides for creating accessible Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents. Step-by-step guides for multiple versions of Microsoft Office are provided.

Open Source Tools for Accessibility Review

• Functional Accessibility Evaluator 2.0 — Spiders a website for WCAG 2.0 Level A and AA requirements and generates a summary report.
• AInspector Sidebar (for Firefox) — An Firefox Add-on to evaluate the current DOM of a web page for WCAG 2.0 Level A and AA requirements.
• Accessibility Bookmarklets — Browser add-ons that help make hidden accessibility information visible to sighted developers

Professional Training Services

A number of vendors offer accessibility-specific training in both online and face-to-face formats. The university does not recommend or have a relationship with the following vendors. These are for informational purposes only. Contact JHU Purchasing to explore the use of these services.

• SSB Bart Group — Offers both face-to-face training and online courses in accessibility basics, Microsoft Office accessibility, web page and application accessibility, and mobile device accessibility.
• EASI — Offers online webinars in accessible PDFs, media players, and web applications.