Unfamiliarity with how to read and write for web accessibility represents a form of illiteracy whereby the disservice, injustice or exclusion that extends from the illiteracy is not felt by the person who is illiterate, but by already marginalized communities of disabled and otherwise disadvantaged internet users.

The Web Accessibility Initiative’s (WAI) recommended strategies for writing accessible digital content can be found repeatedly in technology and compliance literature. However, they are not categorized or engaged with as literacy skills, and technology and compliance literature often lack the contextual information that would assist educators in engaging with these writing strategies as literacy skills.

Unfortunately, there is also little if any acknowledgment of these skills in digital, web or multimodal literacy discourse.

Below, I’ve extrapolated from both the WAI recommendations, literacy skills literature, and Bloom’s Taxonomy to present the WAI’s web content accessibility strategies as literacy skills.

Content Creation Skills

  1. Identify and recall the core accessible content strategies recommended by WAI:
  2. Reflect on the rationales behind the use of these strategies (why are these strategies necessary, who do they help, and how?)
  3. Demonstrate proficiency in implementing the core strategies when creating and sharing digital content; demonstrate an ability to publish content that meets or exceeds current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0 at time of publication).
  4. Demonstrate proficiency in checking the accessibility of content before it is published and/or shared:
    • Implement accessibility checking by using: built-in tools in publishing software (Office, Adobe, LMS, etc.); and/or third-party tools; and/or fluency with accessible content strategies
    • Understand the various limitations of artificial intelligence accessibility checkers
    • Analyze the findings of built-in accessibility checkers, and make corrections as needed
    • Judge when checkers fail to correctly identify errors, apply accessible content strategies to augment or complete the content check
    • Identify reliable sources for advice, plug-ins, or workflow workarounds when an accessibility checker is insufficient or not available. (For example, a citation manager such as Zotero may be part of a publishing workflow but it may not offer an in-product accessibility checker. A Word document writer with proficiency in accessibility checking would know to import the Zotero-produced reference list into the Word document prior to using the accessibility checker in Word. They would also know the limitations of Word’s accessibility checker and review the complete document for misuse or absence of the core accessibility strategies.)
  5. Seek and evaluate feedback from people with disabilities and people in your target audience; if people do not find your content accessible, value their feedback and use it to:
    • assess your interpretation of the core digital accessibility strategies
    • improve your skills
    • improve the accessibility of your original digital work.

Content Curation Skills

Ability to identify, search out or request web-accessible versions of files.

  • Proficiency reading for the use of the above strategies in digital files (and seeing when files do not employ the strategies or employ them poorly)
  • Know to source accessible versions of files from third parties for sharing
  • Be aware of the legislative framework supporting web accessibility, and copyright allowances and limitations to produce accessible versions of files. Or know where to go for advice and information on versioning content.

I’ll share videos, articles and tools in the Resources and FAQ categories to support each of these literacy skills.