Accessibility Considerations for Blogs at Penn State

An important factor in using any technology in a course is ensuring that all students, including those who may rely on screen read or may suffer some other sort of disability have equal access to course content and tools.

The Blogs at Penn State system includes some accessibility features, but instructors can take the following precautions.

Viewing Content

• Blogs with just text are normally accessible. Issues that a student or user may encounter may be reported to blogs@psu.edu.
• If you upload an image into the blog, make sure you give it a descriptive Name in the upload window. This will become the ALT tag used by screenreaders and the text that is seen when an image fails to load.
• Other files that are uploaded to the Blogs such as PDFs, podcast files or Powerpoints should be made as accessible as possible if they are used in a course. See http://accessibility.psu.edu for information on accessibility for these file types.

Students who write blogs entries

Depending on their situation, some users may not be able to fully interact with the system to create and write blog entries. If your course requires posting entries to a blog and a student reports a problem, consider alternate outlets such as the student forwarding an e-mail message/Word file or allowing a tech-saavy student to use another Web technology.

Accessibility problems that a student may encounter writing blog entries can be reported to blogs@psu.edu.

Working with HTML Source and CSS Templates

Although the output of the Blogs at Penn State is generally accessibility, there are always improvements which can be made. If you are comfortable with using the HTML source view and CSS consider these options.

• Paragraph breaks are coded as <br /><br /> and should be replaced with true P tags so that screen reader users can jump between paragraphs.
• Section headers within a long blog entry or page should be tagged as H3; note that entry titles are tagged as H2. This enhances ability of screen reader to jump though sections of a page.
• You can modify the default theme style sheet to make H3 more distinct by default. See http://blogger.psu.edu/node/368 for details
• You can change the B and I tags to STRONG and EM as needed, but this is not as critical as other changes.