Introduction to LibreTexts: Accessibility

LibreTexts has two main accessibility tools:

• Accessibility Checker
• Project Accessibility Checklist

The Accessibility Checker shows as a little person icon in the tools ribbon when editing a page. You can click it at any time to have it run a check for the most common and critical accessibility issues.

On your custom project pages, there is an accessibility checklist page that you can complete to ensure compliance with accessibility requirements.

For accessibility, LibreTexts recommends that you

• Use consistent formatting and organization
• Do not change the font size or color
• Do not link to too many outside sources (as hyperlinks tend to change/break over time)
• Use headers in the first row of tables

Heading and hyperlinks are very important for accessibility. They help to build the organization of the document and inform readers about where they are going and how to find the pieces of information they need. These are especially important for anyone using screen readers!

Formatting Headings

When formatting Headings, only the first heading/title of the page should be a level 1 heading (or H1). Because of this, LibreTexts won't even give you the option to set text as an H1. Headings should reflect consistent use like they would in scholarly articles. H2s as the first level under H1, then H3s under H2 sections, etc. These are critical for screen readers, which will use these to establish the outline or table of contents, allowing blind or vision-impaired readers to skip to sections that they need.

Formatting Hyperlinks

Screen readers will read off hyperlink text as it is written. If you include the hyperlink URL itself, all of that will be read off; which is very not useful. Instead, you need to insert the hyperlink into readable text that describes where the link is going.

Bad Examples:

Go here to search Google.

https://www.google.com

Good Examples:

Google is a useful search engine.

This Quick Evaluation Guide will help you evaluate sources.

On LibreTexts you can use images, videos, and other types of media. LibreTexts accepts most common image formats except for webp, heic, and tiff. They recommend SVG where it is viable, but almost any image format can be used.

Images can be added through the visual editor, using the tools ribbon; however, the easiest way is to save an image to your desktop and then drag and drop it into the page where you want it (within the visual editor).

There are a few basic accessibility practices that you should follow when including images:

• All images should have alt-text. This alt-text should be descriptive of the information that the image is intended to convey. It isn't just about describing the visuals of the image (unless that is its purpose), but about describing the key information students should take away. But it should be no longer than 125 characters in length.
  • If an image is purely decorative, you should still have an alt-text field. However, you want to add an empty space (with the spacebar). This will denote the image as decorative and screen readers will ignore it.
• Avoid heavy reliance on purely decorative images. They can be distracting for some readers.
• Avoid use of animated or overly flashy graphics and images. They can be distracting for some readers.
• Avoid putting important textual information in images alone.