Accessibility in StoryMaps

[ShanaCrosson2]

Given the upcoming changes to new federal digital accessibility regulations requiring (WCAG) Version 2.1, Level AA, we are increasing our education and evaluation of accessibility of StoryMaps produced by students, staff and faculty at the University of Minnesota. 

Two questions:

• Ideally, we would have a way to communicate the basics of author-controlled accessibility (headers, alt text, captions, color contrast, etc) right in the StoryMaps platform. Since we can't add anything to the Dashboard, would it be possible to put a link in the Quick Links section on the StoryMaps Dashboard to a post/StoryMap about creating accessible StoryMaps? You’ve got one StoryMap about accessibility in the tutorials which would be ok, but I really like this succinct StoryMap about accessibility from Dallas College.  It focuses more on the author-controlled aspects of creating accessible StoryMaps. 
• We were looking at a StoryMap using Accessibility Insights (great tool!) We noticed that when you add an Embed for a website, the StoryMap automatically creates an H4. Is this adjustable? In the StoryMap we were reviewing, it should’ve been an H3 (not a Heading 3 from the StoryMap dropdown, but an H3 in code.)

[OwenGeo · Accepted solution]

Hi @ShanaCrosson2!

1. "Getting started with accessible storytelling" is one of the items at the top of our Resources page, which is linked to from the Help menu at the top of the My projects page and each builder.

If you have favorite 3rd party resources, you can encourage students to favorite them so they appear in their My favorites tab or share them to an organization-level group. Both of those practices will make them available within the StoryMaps ecosystem. You can also put links to your preferred resources on your organization's home page or create a Hub site/page to make them easy to find for your students. Those would be outside of StoryMaps, but still highly customizable and easily linkable/findable.

2. We were recently discussing the embed card heading level. Since the embed card title does not represent a new section, it shouldn't be a heading at all, so that is actually a bug we intend to address in one of our upcoming releases.