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Edlio General Refresher Webinar

Added Oct 30, 2018 •

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Refresh yourself on the best accessibility practices and ADA standards. Learn how to share videos, update your pages, attach files and more in this general refresher webinar.

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Alright, thank you so much for joining us today. I apologize for the wait there, we were just getting some stuff ready and I hope you guys are ready to just go over a quick accessibility tutorial for the website. If anyone is having problems with audio just please let me know. Alright, so it's just as we begin, as you know, accessibility for school websites is very important so Edlio's committed to providing you a platform where you can easily take care of accessibility on your website from your CMS at any time. So what we have here is - let's just go over some quick "do"s and "don't"s for your school website and how you as a web administrator or a teacher can do your best to keep the accessibility of your site up-to-date for everyone. One of the biggest points for accessibility are just basics, like you may have known alternative text for all the images and videos on your website. As you might know, on all of the features on your site, such as in our news even calendar or our shuffles and even on your pages, you can add images. But after adding an image, it's very important to make sure that you have alternative text on all of your images. That's just so an impaired user was not able to see the image, they can just use their screen reader to read alternative text. For example, let me just go to a page. Here, we have an example image, so right here you can see that there's an image right here and when you click on the image, it will give you an option to add alt text so you have to make sure that any time a new picture is uploaded to your website, that you make sure to add the alternative text. That is just a short description of the image for someone who can't see the picture. If you have a picture like here, there's already alternative text here, you can put "rainy day," and you can do something like "person holding umbrella under the rain." So the idea is to just describe the image for someone who is not able to see it and this will help make your site accessible to all users regardless of who they are and whether they have the ability to see the picture. After that you just hit the nice save button here, and it will add your alt text. And don't worry, alt text will never show up over the picture, it's only for people who use screen readers to read it. So anytime you add more pictures here, make sure to check for the alt text, so that's on pages. You should do the same thing when you also go to News. When you create a news article, many of you know that you can add a picture to your news articles and those, same thing, make sure you have alternative text on your image. Let's see, if we go here, this is our featured photo so on the website this photo would appear and you can see, for this picture too, there's also an alt text button. Just click on that and then you can add alternative text and just save. Just make sure that's on there. Finally, for those of you that have Spotlight Messages, just make sure to also add alternative text to any Spotlight Messages that you have, so here, we have our featured photo for the Spotlight Message and once again, alternative text. Just make sure to add it. It's a very small step, but as soon as you get into the habit of adding it to every picture on your site, when you add it up, it's very easy to maintain. And if you ever forget you can always just go back to wherever you uploaded a picture, just click edit on the item, and and then click and alt text. So now that that's passed, we will also talk about the second item on your site that often causes accessibility issues for most schools, and that's your videos. So for videos, what's important about videos is making sure that your videos have captions for people who are not able to view the video, but they might still want to listen or know what's being said in it. The nice thing about Edlio videos is that your video uploader on here already adds the captions for you. So, any time you add a new video or audio, within one hour, the Edlio system will already add captions for you. You don't have to do it yourself, so very little work, you just upload it, forget about it, and it will add it for you. If you ever need to edit the captions, what you do is go to the video that you've already uploaded, for example, I'm going to go ahead and look at this video over here. Click to edit it, then scroll down, oops, I'm sorry, this video's not the right one. So this test video. Scroll down to where it says "Closed Captioning." So what I did was I went to videos, I clicked on the video I wanted to edit, and then I scrolled down to the "Closed Captioning," those are your captions. Let's say you want to edit them. Edlio gives you a great feature here where you can easily edit the closed captioning on your video, so anytime you see like a spelling mistake, maybe the closed captioning didn't quite get the words correctly, just go on here, you can change the words as you need to, update them, and just save when you're done. If for some reason you need to clear all the captions, go ahead and click here to clear captions off of the video. But, if your site is worried about ADA accessibility, I would not clear captions on any video because that is very important for the accessibility. Alright, so that's it for the video section. Next on our site, I would highly recommend that you guys take advantage of Edlio's great ADA setting. So, if you're a school that's really concerned about accessibility on your site, Edlio offers you a great ADA setting here, which you can find in Site Management. Go to Settings right here. Click on Settings, and you'll get to this page, your settings, and then click on Accessibility. And you'll see that we have great ADA settings here, so what this does is that alt text will be required across your site so if you have teachers or maybe you as yourself as an administrator, you're just uploading a lot of pictures very often, and you tend to forget to add alt text when you're in a rush, this setting will be a savior for you. What it does, is after you upload a picture, before you can even save the page, it'll let you know if you forgot to add alt text to something on the page. So that's really useful, also for your teachers too, and make sure that your teachers remember to add alt text their pages so that way, you as an administrator, you don't have to monitor other people's pages, you don't have to go through teachers pages, to check to see if they've been adding alt text for your site. But they can easily be able to do it themselves without forgetting, so I'd highly recommend this setting. It also requires the videos to have captions too so you don't worry about videos missing captions and causing problems. In general, this is just a nice way to take care of your site without having too much to manage at once. Would highly recommend all of you to put on the setting, so once again, you can find it by going to Site Management, Settings, and you'll arrive here in the Settings and just click on Accessibility, check this off and then save. And just as a tip, when you put on the setting, it may be that some of your teachers, maybe other administrators, they might have already uploaded pictures to the site without alt text. So what happens, what happens if there's pictures on the site without alt text? What this setting does, is it helps protect your site by removing any photos or pictures without alt text, to make sure you don't get any complaints about missing alt text. So if you ever see that there's a photo missing alt text, just go on the back end of that page or go to that news article or go to that Spotlight Message and just double-check if there's an alt text there. So if there's no alt text, the image won't appear on your website just to protect you. We also recommend that to give yourself enough time to add alt text to important media on their home pages, maybe their personal teacher pages, give them one-to-two weeks advance notice before you turn on the setting. Otherwise, if you don't tell them and you turn on the setting, they might log in the next day and realize that all their pictures are gone from their site and you just need to let them know, just go back, add alt text and they'll reappear again. Alright, so if you have any questions, just let us know. That covers that. And now I'm going to go into more detail on accessibility for pages. Okay, so I'm just going to head over to a page. Okay, so this is a great page. One other nice feature that Edlio offers to you is that on your pages, you don't have to worry about color contrast. So some of you might know this, but part of accessibility is making sure that the colors on your website are easily readable by people with low vision or might be color blind. So, what that means is that the text needs to be readable on the page. So, I don't know if you guys have ever tried this, but reading light colored text, like a light yellow, on a white background, that's really difficult to read and that's actually very bad for accessibility. So, colors need to be either a dark color on a white background like we have here - black and white is the perfect color, or the other way around - white on black or white on like a dark blue, dark red, something like that. So like this color right here is like a gray, gray-black, and black on white is totally fine but, if this text was maybe the background was yellow instead, so white on yellow, that would not pass color contrast standards under accessibility. But the nice thing on your website, is that all websites are equipped with only ADA-approved colors right here. So all these colors can be used on your website without any worry about if the color is too light, is the color too dark. As long as all of your pages are always white, you can just be rest-assured that you and all of your teachers can use any of the colors here and still have an ADA-compliant site. So they can choose from these one's here and you can also choose more colors, but I would warn your teachers not to use something like, you know, like a light pink. Those are not dark enough for the website so if I were to highlight this right here, let's make this that light pink color that I was hovering over earlier, that would be, as you can see, you can barely read that text. Can't read that at all so that would definitely pose an ADA problem. Just make sure your teachers know just to pick these pre-approved colors right here and they will just be just fine. Okay, another do and don't, so now we're going to talk about Links. Many of you have links in your pages, that's great, but ADA accessibility actually asks that you make your links easy-to-understand what they're for. What does that mean? So, let's say I have a link to google.com and I write something like "click here." So let's say I make a link to Google, Text to Display, that's what the link is going to be called, I just put "click here." So here I created a link, you'll see here, but now, let's imagine that you're a person who's just on this website and there's no context, you see this link, it says "click here," but you don't know what it's for so that poses a problem for accessibility because many users who cannot read or are unable to easily read the page like a normal person, they might have trouble telling what this text is for. iIt's very vague, it just says "click here," they're not sure what happens when they click on it, so that poses a problem, so instead, what recommends that you do is you make the link more descriptive. So, you write something like "click here to go to Google." Now that's an excellent link because if I were a person going on this page and I see this link says "click here to go to Google," I know exactly what it does. So, I would just avoid saying things like "click here" or say "go here." Those are too vague so always ask yourself the question, click here to do what or go here to do what? Make sure to answer your question. It doesn't even have to be so long, it could be "Google link" or "link to Google." It can be as simple and short as that as long as it's descriptive so you can just make a quick look over on your website and just make sure that you don't have any links that might say things like a vague "click here for registration." Let me just put dot-COM. So just like before, this link right here is not a very good link because screen readers will only read the link and it'll just tell them that the link says "here" and they can't read it, so what a better thing to do would be to make the whole link that sends instead of writing "click here," for the link, just do the hole link, make the whole link in a sense. So you can see the differences between these two links: one is a link which is here, the second link, just is much more descriptive, says "click here to register." It's even more visible so it's always better for your users to make a more descriptive link. Alright, I'm going to go ahead and get rid of those and finally, you're able to add videos here and all of that. And last thing, I know many schools like to do this, sometimes you have a nice flyer for an event, maybe it's like a Halloween party, maybe it's like a parents day out and you have a flier that's an image, you just have to ask yourself, "if I had a parent who was blind or who had maybe a student who has low vision, would they be able to read this picture with text on it?" and if the answer is no, then it's really important to, maybe let's say you added a flyer to this page, to also put important information on the flier down as text. So, that way, a blind person who was not able to see the image, they can at least read the written text underneath it. So that's just a very small "don't." If you have any questions about that, just let us know. So, next let's just go to our last things. A couple more "do"s and "don't"s. Many of your schools, you might have something called The Marquee. So what the Marquee is, it's a running text on top of your page. Let's see if we have an example here. Right here, this is called a marquee. A lot of schools really love this, but the problem is, they're not ADA-friendly, they're not accessible. The reason is, because they move. So visitors, parents, students with low vision, they have trouble reading text that's moving across the screen like that so because of that, the Office of Civil Rights have said that marquees are not accessible. So if you're a school that's kind of worried about your accessibility and you want to be as ADA-friendly as possible, we would recommend not using a marquee because people with low vision cannot read them and they have a hard time reading them. It does pause if you hover over the marquee, so that gives them some time to read them, but in general, a lot of ADA accessibility software and programs, they'll mark you up for this, so if you have a marquee, and you want to get as ADA-friendly as possible, just go ahead and submit a tech support ticket to our team and just let us know that you want to get of the marquees on your site to be more ADA-friendly. I will be super happy to help you with that, we'll just remove the marquee in your site. There's other great ways to advertise information on your website if it's locked through the marquee, maybe do a news pop-up alert, that's an excellent way to get the news out and you can even put news articles on your site and there's even these little buttons, there's a lot of ways that you can get information on your site without having to use the Marquee so I would just recommend not having those if you want to get ADA-compliant so just send tech support a ticket and just let us know. And in case anyone has questions about different features on the site, we really make sure that all the features on your site are as ADA accessible as possible so that even things like this "join our mailing list" right here, those are accessible so you don't need to worry about not using them and even buttons like this, here, where it has "Tour sign up," don't worry about using those, please feel free to use those. Those are accessible on your website. So you don't have to worry about making us of these other great features. Pretty much only the Marquee is the only item that causes a lot of accessibility problems for most teachers and schools. So as you can see accessibility is quite easy, actually, most of it comes from having alt texts on your images and making sure that your videos have captions on them and just, in general, letting your teachers know about accessibility. We have a great accessibility guide on our Help Center, which I will show you right now. We would highly recommend just showing your teachers this article just to get them up-to-date on what is accessibility, why it's important, there's even a guide for accessibility tests for teachers. I would highly recommend you just sending out an email to your teachers and just reminding them that these things are important. It lists some really easy steps for teachers, some of them we already went over, avoid ambiguous link text, let's just click here, we went over that. We went over that images and audio should have alternative text, alt text. There's even other small tips like a lot of teachers love uploading PDFs, so they just need to make sure, that their PDFs, they have a good descriptive name so that way a blind user who's using a screen reader to read out text, they know exactly what those files were, for example, there's a good example here. This is an example of like, a lot of teacher say, upload class files that say like "notes" or "worksheet 1" or "worksheet 2." Let's imagine that you're a student who cannot easily read this, then it would be much more useful to have a good, descriptive file name so that way it's much easier for them to access the information they need. Addition-practice-worksheet.pdf, they know exactly what that is. Math-lessons for next week, that's perfect so they can, at one glance, know what the file is for. And this goes for web administrators too. If you upload PDFs to the site, maybe like your board meeting minutes, school calendar and things like that, just make it as descriptive as possible, maybe at the date inside the file name instead of just "board meeting number 2." Say "board meeting for the week of October 26th" or "calendar for the school year 2018 to 2019," that's much better than just saying "calendar." So, if you want to find this accessibility article, just go over to our Help Center, you can do that from your website, you don't have to go anywhere. Just go over here, go to Help, click on Help Center as I did before, and you can type in our new fancy search bar now in our Help Center, just type in accessibility and you'll be able to access these articles and there's also a great article for web administrator so after this, highly recommend that you just go over there, give yourself a brief refresher. As always, if you have any questions about the accessibility in your site, just go ahead and send in a ticket to our tech support team or email us at ADAsupport@edlio.com and we'll make sure to give you a reply and help you out with any questions you might have. Okay, thank you guys for joining us today and hope you guys do well on your sites. If you have any questions just let us know. Thank you so much.

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