Well the road was a bit bumpy but here is my first artifact. I chose to create a very simple design. I used the key words in the definition to create a circle around the words Educational Technology. Then outside of the circle of words, there are three images. One is of an ear, one is of a stick figure with a left hand amputated and the last is of a blind stick figure using a service animal and cane. Underneath the circle of words is a question that has been on my mind these past 2 weeks — who is left outside of the circle of Educational Technology?

You see, most of technology is not created with disabilities in mind. A deaf individual needs captions for videos and transcripts for audio files. An amputee may rely on adaptive keyboards and mice, indicating that everything required in a course, software, program or tool should be usable by only using the keyboard. (This is a fun test. Try to do your daily computer tasks without using the mouse. Pretty tough, huh?). And a blind individual may have the greatest obstacles of all. Essentially, every website, file, software, program and tool needs to have special code built into the page in order for a blind person to navigate and identify the main parts of the desired resource.

I took special care to make my graphic accessible to folks like I mentioned above. For example, I used black and white colors for low-vision and color-blind users. The words were marked up with the proper heading structure with “Educational Technology” defined as a Heading 2 and the rest of the words as a Heading 2. There is alternate text associated with each link. And the links say more than “click here” in order to provide context for a blind user. I also included specific download information so folks know where to look to actually see my graphic. Giving the user the option to see the PDF and the Word Doc is also a nice accessibility option — text files like Word Doc, RTFs, TXTs tend to be more screen reader friendly.

Paint and Google Docs were used in creating this artifact. I do not take credit for any of the 3 images contained within the graphic.

Artifact (1) in PDF format (viewable in Chrome and Safari, goes to downloads folder on Firefox)

Artifact (1) in Word Doc format (goes to downloads folder on Chrome, Safari and Firefox)