Step 1: How to comply with the Web Accessibility Procedures
Go to the How to comply with the Web Accessibility Procedures training(link is external) on the UCB training learning management system. Complete the training. Your completion will be tracked and reported on. This training is required for most UC Berkeley employees.
Step 2: Concepts for everyone to learn
Go to the Accessibility Basics web page. These concepts are crucial for accessibility, and you’ll need to learn them whether you’re a content editor or a web developer. You may want to focus on one concept at a time.
Step 3: Advanced and specialized courses
- W3C / WAI: Digital Accessibility Foundations(link is external) - this is a free, 4-week online course offered by the same organization that produces the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) that UC Berkeley uses as our compliance goal.
- LinkedIn Learning courses are free for UCB employees(link is external) - there are a variety of courses related to accessible web design and document creation.
- If you need to learn to remediate PDFs yourself (instead of using a vendor), we recommend LinkedIn Learning.
- PDF remediation(link is external) (5 hours)
- Advanced Accessible PDFs(link is external) (6 hours)
Step 4: Learn to use accessibility checkers
Here are some excellent tools for running automated accessibility checks. There are lots of others you may choose to adopt, but these three cover most of what you can check for with automated tests.
Remember: Automated testing tools are extremely useful, but they can’t check everything.
- Siteimprove(link is external) is a robust service that’s available for all UC websites.
- WAVE(link is external) is a free browser extension. Learn how to use WAVE.
- Grackle Docs, Grackle Slides, and Grackle Sheets are Google Add-ons. Access to the paid version of these add-ons will be available for all Berkeley employees starting Fall 2024.
Step 5: Find and bookmark resources
There are lots of fantastic, free resources to help you build accessible communications. Here are a few to get you started, but we recommend building your own set of go-to resources over time.
Web content editors
- W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)(link is external)
- webAIM(link is external)
- 18F Accessibility Guides(link is external)