WebAIM: Website Accessibility Evaluation Tool

Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act requires that federal agencies make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. Section 255 of the Communications Act, as amended by the Telecommunications act of 1996, requires that electronic communications for the purpose of goods and services be accessible to people with disabilities. What does this all mean for most people? These acts clearly state that if you provide goods or services through a public facing website it must be accessible to people with disabilities.

It is much easier to create websites from the ground up with accessibility in mind than to retroactively make them accessible to satisfy a check list. As a whole the web still has a long way to go before it's truly accessibly by everyone. Don't get me wrong, it's much better than it was even 5 years ago.

 WebAIM, a non-profit organization founded in 1999 and based at Utah State University, is committed to making the web more accessible to people with disabilities. They provide training, evaluation, and consulting services on how to make the web a better place for everyone. As a part of the services provided by WebAIM they have created a tool called Wave. Wave is a tool for evaluating the accessibility of websites. There are three ways to use Wave. The first is to use the http://wave.webaim.org main page and enter the URL/weblink into the field and press or click return. This will generate a report detailing any issues the site may have. The second is to use a web browser plugin for Firefox or Chrome. When using this method there is a button added to the browsers navigation that allows for report generations. The third is more for enterprise/corporate level websites. DinoLytics, which uses the Wave engine, can provide accessibility reports on a site-wide level.

When using the Wave tool it is important to remember it's just a tool and method for evaluation. The tool will sometime flag things that are not exactly errors. In the report side bar red icon indicates accessibility errors that need to be corrected. The green icon represents areas in the site where the accessibility features can be approved upon. Additional icons, mainly the yellow icons, are things that should probably be checked.

More information on the tool and website accessibility can be found at https://webaim.org and http://wave.webaim.org.

Adobe Spark, Tell Stories in the Classroom

Teachers need help with incorporating technology into their learning outcomes and classrooms. Librarians have a wealth of knowledge about technology integration and are a great source. Institutions need librarians to lead in integrating technology into instruction. Librarians are a good fit for this role because of their commitment to personal growth and learning (Johnson, 2012). One example of how they can do this is to recommend tools to help instructors with specific needs.

One such tool I found while reading an ed tech blog titled, MrKempNZ by Craig Kemp. He is a Google certified teacher that is based in Singapore. Mr. Kemp, who is originally from New Zealand, writes a blog about digital learning transformations. In one of his recent post he talked about what he thought were the top 10 EdTech tools for 2019. In this post he referenced a tool called Adobe Spark.

Adobe Spark is a beginner level tool that consist of three components: Spark Page, Spark Post, and Spark Video. It has almost zero learning curve and does not require an Adobe creative cloud  membership. I think this tool would work really well for my faculty and graduate students trying to share their research content on the web. I could also see librarians helping teachers add it to their curriculum for assignments. The tool can be used in a web browser or through apps that are available for both apple and google device platforms. I think Spark page will be the most useful for my because it allows novice users to create simple web pages with minimal effort so that they can focus on the content. This could be a life saver for my faculty who are required to have web pages for their research. The video component, Spark video, is nice too but it is limited in the length of video that can be produced. I am not sure that the social media integration would be of use to most of my colleagues.

Picture used from commons.wikipedia.org

More information about Adobe Spark can be found at https://spark.adobe.com/.


Resources:

Horne, K. (2019). Adobe spark review. Retrieved June, 5, 2019 from https://www.whoishostingthis.com/hosting-reviews/adobe-spark/

Johnson, M. P. (2012). School librarians as technology integration leaders: Enablers and barriers to leadership enactment. School Library Research, 15, 22-24.

Kemp, C. (2019). Top 10 edtech tools for teaching and learning in 2019. Retrieved June, 5, 2019 from http://mrkempnz.com/2019/01/the-top-10-edtech-tools-for-teaching-and-learning-in-2019.html