Accessible, mobile-ready content -- Terminology

Here is some terminology that's helpful to know if you're talking with publishers about the accessibility of their course materials.

OCR

"Optical Character Recognition. . . is a technology that recognizes text within a digital image. It is commonly used to recognize text in scanned documents." (from TechTerms Links to an external site.)  

  • If your publisher provides a PDF of some chapters, ask if it is readable by a screen-reader. OCR is one means of accomplishing that. 

VPAT 

"A Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT™) is a document that explains how information and communication technology (ICT) products such as software, hardware, electronic content, and support documentation meet (conform to) the Revised 508 Standards Links to an external site. for IT accessibility. VPATs™ help Federal agency contracting officials and government buyers to assess ICT for accessibility when doing market research and evaluating proposals." (from Section508.gov) Links to an external site.

  • Ask your publisher for the VPAT for all the online components of your textbook, e.g. homework sites or ebooks. If they don't know what you're talking about, that tells you a lot about the accessibility of that site.  Links to an external site.

WCAG 2.0 (or 2.1, 2.2)

"The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are part of a series of web accessibility Links to an external site. guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative Links to an external site. (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium Links to an external site. (W3C), the main international standards organization for the Internet. They are a set of recommendations for making Web content more accessible, primarily for people with disabilities Links to an external site.—but also for all user agents Links to an external site., including highly limited devices, such as mobile phones." (from Wikipedia Links to an external site.)

  • Accessibility professionals will often ask if a site is "WCAG 2.0 (or 2.2) compliant," which is shorthand for whether the site meets the current standard for accessibility that is applied in many legal proceedings. You can look for that text, or ask publishers, on web sites that you use in class.