abstract: With 285-million blind and visually impaired worldwide, and 25.5 million in the United States, federally funded universities should be at the forefront when designing accessible websites for the blind community. Fifty percent of the university homepages discussed in my thesis failed accessibility checker tests because alternative text was not provided in the alt-attribute for numerous images, making them inaccessible to blind users. The images which failed included logos, photographs of people, and images with text. Understanding image content and context in relation to the webpage is important for writing alternative text that is useful, yet writers interpret and define the content and context of images differently or not at all. Not all universities follow legal guidelines of using alternative text for online images nor implements best practices of analyzing images prior to describing them within the context of the webpage. When an image used in a webpage is designed only to be seen by sighted users and not to be seen by screen reader software, then that image is not comparably accessible to a blind user, as Section 508 mandates. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Technical Communication 2018

Singing exaggerates the language of reading. The students find their voices in the rhythm and bounce of language by using music as an alternative text. A concurrent mixed methods study was conducted to investigate the use of an interactive sing-to-read program Tune Into Reading (Electronic Learning Products, 2006) as an alternative text, embedded within a heterogeneous music classroom. Measured by the Qualitative Reading Inventory-4 (QRI-4) (Leslie & Caldwell, 2006), the fluency, word recognition, comprehension, and instructional reading level of the treatment students were compared to their counterparts who sang as part of the regular music program. Concurrently, this investigation also provided a description of the peers’ interactions during the literacy task assigned by the music teacher. The intent of this study was to address the following three research questions. First, what is the difference in reading outcomes for students who used the singing software verses the students who sang as part of their regular music curriculum? Second, are the reading outcomes different when the students were grouped by FCAT reading levels? Third, how do the peers interact during the literacy task of singing to read? The first two questions addressed the quantitative phase of this study to assess the collective differences on the dependent variables overtime and by group. The qualitative phase in this study used an interpretive case study approach to describe peer interactions during the assigned literacy task. The study findings suggest that rereading through singing, using the interactive singing program, Tune Into Reading, was more effective regardless of the reading levels for treatment students compared to control students. In addition, prosody appeared to have a direct connection to reading comprehension. Furthermore, the use of the interactive program provided opportunities for differentiated reading level achievement. Finally, group dynamics highly influenced the early adolescent’s motivation, engagement, participation, and successful outcomes in reading fluency.