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TACCU

Tampere Accessibility Unit

Digital Accessibility Basics

Most of what a university gives a student is now digital: slides, reading lists, recorded lectures, assignment briefs, the registration form. If these are built badly, a student who uses a screen reader, navigates by keyboard, or needs captions is shut out before teaching begins.

What is accessibility? explains the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and the POUR principles. This page covers what to do about them in three places: the web, documents, and course content.

Six problems cause most of the harm

The WebAIM Million report tests the home pages of the top one million websites each year. In 2026 it found failures on 95.9% of them. Six problems caused about 96% of everything detected:

  • Text with low contrast (83.9% of pages)
  • Images without alternative text (53.1%)
  • Form fields without labels (51%)
  • Empty links (46.3%)
  • Empty buttons (30.6%)
  • Pages that do not declare their language (13.5%)

Universities are not an exception. A study of all 26 university home pages in South Africa found that none met all the WCAG 2.0 criteria.

So the practical rules are short. Check contrast at 4.5 to 1 for normal text and 3 to 1 for large text, and never carry meaning by colour alone. Describe informative images and mark decorative ones as decorative. Use real headings in order, because screen reader users navigate by jumping between them. Write link text that makes sense on its own, since ”click here” tells a screen reader user nothing. Label every form field in the code. Declare the page language. And check that everything works by keyboard alone.

Some easily fixable things that cause almost all the damage.

Documents

Course material usually reaches students as a Word file, a slide deck or a PDF. A small set of habits fixes nearly all of it: use the built-in heading styles rather than making text big and bold; use the built-in list buttons rather than typing dashes; add alternative text to images; mark table headers and avoid merged cells; set the document language. When you export to PDF, tick ”Create bookmarks using headings” and enable structure tags, or the structure you built is thrown away.

Scanned documents need their own warning. A scan cannot be searched, selected or read aloud. It is a picture of a document, not a document. Run optical character recognition on it before sharing. Where a document cannot be fixed, offer another format on request, as Article 24 of the Convention requires.

This is worth taking seriously because academic practice is a poor example. A study of 20,000 scholarly PDFs published between 2014 and 2023 found that fewer than 3.2% met a basic set of accessibility criteria and that 74.9% met none.

Course content

An accessible platform does not produce an accessible course. An audit of 50 Moodle courses at a university in Zimbabwe found only 14% met WCAG 2.1 AA in full. Captions were missing from 88% of courses, image descriptions from 86%, and 80% contained unreadable PDFs.

  • Caption every recording and provide a transcript. Captions are not only for deaf students. A synthesis of over 100 studies found that video with captions produced the highest comprehension for hearing and deaf learners alike, and that students studying in a second language recalled more with captions in the same language as the audio
  • Keep navigation consistent from week to week
  • Name files descriptively. ”Lecture1_FINAL_v3.pdf” tells nobody anything
  • Avoid text inside images, which cannot be read aloud or enlarged cleanly
  • Make quizzes keyboard operable and agree extended time in advance
  • Release material early, so students who need to convert it have time

The same Zimbabwe study explains why this is not happening. Only 16.1% of staff had received training in accessible design, while 87.1% said they wanted it. The barrier is training, not willingness.

Data cost and bandwidth

In most developing economies accessible and affordable are usually in the same conversation. A study conducted in Zimbabwe found that data costs affected 85.2% of students with disabilities, and power cuts disrupted access for 87.8% of rural respondents. A review of e-learning research in Tanzania found internet access and lack of support were the most reported obstacles.

For a student who is mobile-only, on expensive data and using a screen reader, a 90 MB scanned PDF is not just one barrier as it creates multiple problems.

Accessible content is usually smaller and faster, which serves every student on the course.

Where to start

Aim for WCAG 2.2 Level AA, published in October 2023 and updated in December 2024. WCAG 3.0 exists only as a draft with years of work ahead.

In most African countries there is no national ICT accessibility standard. Rwanda’s Digital Inclusion Strategy lists such guidelines as future work and notes that most digital solutions are not designed with accessibility for people with disabilities in mind. So the case rests on the Convention, which both countries have ratified, and on what the institution owes its students. Article 9 asks states to promote accessible design at an early stage, so that these technologies and systems become accessible at minimum cost.

You can start by picking one course and giving yourself one month as a target. Caption the recordings, fix the headings, replace the scans.

Checklist and practices

Web pages:

  • Contrast at 4.5 to 1, or 3 to 1 for large text
  • Alternative text on informative images
  • Real headings, in order
  • Link text that makes sense alone
  • Labelled form fields and a declared page language
  • Keyboard operable, with a visible focus indicator

Documents:

  • Built-in heading styles and list formatting
  • Marked table headers, no merged cells
  • Bookmarks and structure tags when exporting to PDF
  • Optical character recognition on anything scanned

Course content:

  • Captions and transcripts on every recording
  • Consistent navigation and descriptive file names
  • No text inside images
  • Material released in advance
  • Small file sizes for students on mobile data

Remember:

  • Aim for WCAG 2.2 Level AA, not AAA
  • Six error types cause almost all the damage
  • An accessible platform does not make a course accessible
  • Captions help far more students than they were designed for
  • Accessible here also means light, fast and usable offline

Links and references