Color Contrast ADA Compliance for Blackboard Courses

A rising issue in development lately has been ADA compliance and Web Accessibility. In many of my returning courses, I've started to note to professors items that could potentially be compliance issues. One of the most common issues I've come across is use of COLOR in Blackboard courses. Contrary to the popular professor and developer belief, just because Blackboard GIVES you a color doesn't necessarily mean that it is ADA compliant!

For full ADA and Web Accessibility compliance with WCAG 2.0, color contrast in courses must have at least a ratio of 5:1 for level 2 compliance and a ratio of 10:1 for level 3 compliance. I think it should be noted that in our effort to support the highest standard of quality in our courses, we should always strive to use colors that meet level 3 compliance.

With that in mind, I decided to set out to see exactly WHICH of the offered colors in Blackboard were actually compliant and what level of compliance they met.

Here is a summary of the results:

• Total number of colors offered in the blackboard palette: 216
  • Number of colors that meet level 3 compliance:  24
  • Number of colors that only meet level 2 compliance: 43
  • Number of colors that are non-compliant: 149

As you can see, only 11% of the colors are level 3 compliant and about 20% more are level 2 compliant only. But, the majority of colors offered by blackboard (69%) are not compliant. And not many professors know this!

At the request of a professor I've been working with, I've created a resource that can be shared with them. It is just a simple HTML page that can be e-mailed. Its not hosted through any server at the moment. Feel free to take this file and adjust it, change it as needed, and use it as you would like.

File: ADA Color Contrast Page for Blackboard 9.0+

Embed Audio Narration in Microsoft Powerpoint 2007/2010

Now more than ever, multimedia has become an important aspect for online courses. This is true from both a development aspect AND a student aspect. Particularly concerning any course classified as a TxVSN course, one of the general requirements is that students must submit some kind of multimedia presentation. One option for this multimedia requirement is creating an audio-narrated powerpoint.

Students (and even some professors) are not familiar enough with Powerpoint to know how to record and embed the audio narration so that it can be moved as one file.

At the request of a professor, I created a Captivate tutorial for "How to Record Audio Narration in Microsoft Office Powerpoint 2007". The tutorial is general enough that it can be used by professors that need to know how to use it to create course lectures or by students creating assignment presentations.


Feel free to use this link as a resource: http://rchsrv.utpb.edu/flash/Tutorials/Powerpoint_Narration_Tutorial/SavingPowerpointNarration_2.htm 


Update (7/3/12) : This tutorial should also work for anyone using Office 2010 as well.