What is Digital Accessibility?
Answer
What is Digital Accessibility?
Digital Accessibility Defined
Digital accessibility focuses on the design of electronic materials in ways that consider the needs of all people, regardless of disability or environment. Digital accessibility is an aspect of web accessibility, which more broadly focuses on designing websites, applications, tools, and other products around principles of inclusion. The goal of both digital and web accessibility is to remove barriers to communication and interaction on the web that people may face in physical environments.
Digital accessibility is beneficial for all people, including disabled people. Accessibility features help most people navigate digital content more effectively. Closed captioning, for example, benefits Deaf people and people who are hard of hearing. Closed captioning is also used in noisy environments or to help make audio clearer, demonstrating a wide-reaching benefit of universal digital accessibility.
Digital Accessibility Skills
Creating and designing course content and materials for digital accessibility includes a set of foundational skills. These skills apply to various forms of content, such as Canvas courses, Microsoft Office files, Google Drive files, images, PDFs, and more. TCNJ uses the Pope Tech check course accessibility, both when creating new content and reviewing pre-existing courses. The core digital accessibility skills are listed below. Select an item to learn more from Pope Tech Accessibility about what it means and why it matters.