Digital Information Access in Cultural Institutions
Recommendations: Accessibility
How does one improve the accessibility of digital platforms where accessibility and inclusive design were not considered in their development?
It is more helpful to visitors to begin with small, incremental improvements rather than putting off a launch of any improvements until all are ready to go live.
Referencing the WCAG guidelines and Sina Bahram’s ten best practices of accessible museum websites, as discussed in our Case Study 4: Accessibility page, is a great place to begin determining which incremental improvements to start with. Once you’re ready to begin, the following tools can help assess the accessibility of existing websites and inform accessible additions for inclusive design.
Interested in tools to begin developing alt-text for previously digitized collections, either internally or externally? Check out the Coyote and Block Museum sections of our Inspirations page.
This detailed, customizable guide presents success criteria for each of the four principles of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) alongside techniques for implementing them.
Developed in collaboration with accessibility leaders and other museums, the guideline from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum presents a guiding structure and detailed recommendations for creating effective descriptions for complex images.
This web accessibility evaluation tool, developed by Web Accessibility in Mind (WebAIM), runs checks of webpages to check for Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) errors.
This page, published by Web Accessibility in Mind (WebAIM) supports consideration of diverse perspectives of blindness, low vision, auditory disabilities, motor disabilities, and cognitive disabilities through presentations of challenges and solutions.
This contrast checker from Web Accessibility in Mind (WebAIM) evaluates the accessibility of foreground and background colors against different WCAG guideline levels.
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This list of software and tools, published by the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII), can be used to explore and address issues impacting the following disability groups: blindness, low vision, cognitive, physical, and deaf/hard of hearing.
Author and Editor: Tess Porter, 2021