LESSON: 7 Things You Can Do Right Now to Make Your Moodle Course More Accessible

1) Give links a display name, instead of pasting an actual URL.

• Screen reader software will attempt to read the entire URL, including characters, numbers, and other text. This is time-consuming, and presents a barrier to those using screen readers.

• Write link text so that it describes the content of the link target. (i.e., "View the problem set")

• "Click here" as a hyperlink - by itself - is problematic. Why? Screen reader users frequently use a shortcut to scan only the hyperlinks of a document in a list as a way of scanning a page. If the list of all of the links in a webpage simply says "click here" over and over again, they will have little sense where each link leads them.

• "Contact your advisor" is better than "Click here to contact your advisor" or "Link to academic advisors." The user should be able to tell based on the text alone where it is going to take them.

• Indicate relevant information about the link target, such as document type and size, for example, ‘Proposal Documents (RTF, 20MB)’. Or 'Open the class Zoom session'.
  

• If you must use URLs as link text only, do so  if the URL is very short and meaningful. (e.g. microsoft.com)
  

2) If an image serves as a link, the alternative text of the image serves as the link text. Make sure that it follows the guidelines for links.

• If using images as links, the alt text should describe where the link navigates to, not what the image is.

• Users may get frustrated if they try to click on textual phrases or graphics that look like links but are not. They will also be frustrated if they have to move their mouse all over the page trying to discover links that do not look like links.

• By default, links in GCC's Moodle are in green font, and when you hover over them, they appear underlined. Please keep this formatting when you are considering changing the color of your text.