Accessibility

Create content that can be read aloud by a screen reader. This could be used by a person who is blind or has low-vision. 

• Use titles and heading styles to assist read aloud systems in separating the information.
• Avoid headers, footers, and text boxes.
• Avoid uploading a graphic (picture or image) with multiple lines of text, such as a flyer or handout. Instead, use text from the flyer as content for the web page, event calendar, or social media instead of a graphic with text.
  • A screen reader will only see a photograph and not read any of the text within.
• Use accessibility checkers on Word and Adobe Acrobat to improve your document's accessibility. 

Simple pages with short, easy-to-comprehend sentences load faster and work better on mobile devices. This could be used by a person without high-speed internet or the latest computer or mobile device. Please note that a considerable amount of our site's traffic is from mobile devices.

Make sure content is organized logically, with the most important information at the top. Organize content into meaningful chunks. Use built-in headings like Heading 1 for the document title, Heading 2 for major document headings, and Heading 3 for sub-headings under pre-existing Heading 2 content. Keep the paragraph text "Normal" style.

Good color contrast helps to make sure anyone can easily read through our site, especially if a person has color-blindness.

• Avoid colored text.
• Avoid using foreground and background colors that can blend together.
• Use default text colors and styles provided by Microsoft Word or Plone.
• Use the Color Contrast Checker to determine appropriate color contrast pairs.

Make sure hyperlinks are not broken and use descriptive text for link labels.

Do not use "click here" for hyperlink text. Instead, use wording like "Learn more about Financial Aid," "Apply to CNM," or "Register online." Your hyperlinked text should describe what information the linked page will contain.

• Numbered lists are used for step-by-step processes.
• Bulleted points are used to separate items and organize information in a more appealing way.

Write clear sentences that are easily translatable or include translation through CNM's Language Services. This makes the content accessible to people whose primary language is not English.

There are three ways to create captions for a video:

• You can ask Media Production Services to request your video to get captioning from an outside captioning service, which will produce captions from the audio of the final (ready to publish) video.
• You can edit auto-generated captions.
• We can create and edit captions in the video manager inside of our CNM Suncats YouTube account.

There are three ways to add captions to a video:

• Captioning service returns video with captions embedded directly onto each frame of the video (least flexible for accessibility).
• Captioning service returns a .SRT file (a file containing synced captions for the video)  containing captions to get uploaded with the video file (fastest and most flexible for accessibility).
• Download the .SRT file from auto-generated and edited captions from YouTube and upload the .SRT file to the Facebook video settings (slower, but most flexible for accessibility).

Auto-generated captions can be created in YouTube and Facebook, however captions need editing before publishing the video.

Best practices for editing auto-generated captions:

• describe sound effects
• synchronize text with audio
• proofread for grammar and punctuation

YouTube allows multiple language captions for a single video stream. A setting in the video stream can be toggled to select different language captions. This removes multiple file uploads of the same video.

• For example, if a video is made for multiple audiences in mind (such as for Global Education promotions), you can get captions made in another language and the captions can be uploaded to the same video.