Accessibility Requirements

Online Training for Accessibility

To learn more about accessibility, you can sign up for a series of online Canvas courses that are available. These are self-paced, self-enrolled online courses conducted on Canvas. To enroll yourself, use these links:

Making Online Material Accessible

Here are some tips for making online material accessible to people with visual disabilities. We want our course content to be as easy as possible to use for students with disabilities. The topic of making course sites accessible is a complex one, this page is merely meant explain a few basic tips.

Legal Considerations - ADA Compliance Matters - IT'S THE LAW

See the ADA One web site: http://ada-one.com/focus/higher-education/. By law we are required to ensure that there is no discrimination for students with disabilities, and this affects all material in, and format of, any online, hybrid, flipped, or technology-assisted on-campus. Non compliance could result in legal action being taken against faculty personally as well as your institution just like the law suit taken in November 2010 against Penn State in regard to accessibility and more recently and equally startling cases involved MIT, Harvard, and many other educational institutions which were sued in Fall 2014.

Additional Resources

In order to assist you in creating an online class that is accessible, here is some additional information:

UDOIT

We now have the UDOIT Tool added to our Canvas server. This tool automatically checks for accessibility in your Canvas courses. See more details and instructions at UDOIT Instructions.

Some General Guidelines

PDF Files

Some PDF files are not accessible. "Image-only" PDF files present significant accessibility barriers for screen reader users. These files are inaccessible because they contain only graphic images representing each page instead of actual text characters. Although text may appear on the screen, it is only a picture of text without the underlying characters needed by a screen reader. Image-only PDF files are created when you scan a paper document, producing an image of the document. You need to convert the image into accessible text by using an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool, (e.g. Adobe Acrobat). However, even with the best OCR technology available, the result may not be perfect.

Therefore, we recommend that you provide students with a Word document version whenever possible.

This only applies to PDF documents created from scans - PDFs created by saving from Word will are fine as-is.

Videos

Closed captioning or transcripts of all videos is required for ADA compliance. However, this has been an expensive exercise as most commercial services are on a per-minute rate, and most institutions are seeking free or reasonably priced options that have low error rate in the text. This regulation also applies to online and on-campus classes. Course lecture videos are recommended to be at most 10 minutes of substantive content that emphasizes the main issues being presented and other important aspects of the topic as this will help keep costs down. If two topics are covered in a weekly session then two videos of that length can be created. Short substantive lectures also help students focus on the issues presented.

NOTE: IF you choose to use video from other sources as components in your course please find ones provide closed captions. If they don't, you can contact our team and we'll try and provide closed captions for the video for you.

When you search for YouTube videos, you can filter for videos that include Closed Captioning:

Headings

Fonts

Select a style, such as "Heading 2" instead of simply increasing font size, so that screen readers can better interpret structure.

Do not use fonts less than 10 point in documents and size 3 font on a web page. DO NOT use long and narrow fonts as these are hard to distinguish for visually impaired people, rather the standard Arial, Verdana, or Times New Roman fonts.

Bold

Please DO NOT BOLD everything like this to emphasize things otherwise what is important will become lost and irrelevant.

Underlining

Please do not underline text to highlight or emphasize a point like this as this is mistakenly thought to be an accessible link, and like the BOLD issue mentioned above, when you really want students to select a link they won't recognize it as being one.

Color

Be careful not to use too many different colored headings or text through the course, and use strong colors where possible, NOT Orange or Yellow. It is good, however, to use a color schema consistently through a course as this make it readable and emphasizes directions and instructions, as well as being aesthetically pleasing.

Diagrams

When creating diagrams, insert a brief description (smaller text) adjacent to the object describing what is being depicted. Screen readers can read this to a visually impaired person, but cannot read diagrams. Also, the use of color in diagrams to depict opposite ideas or the like should NOT use Red and Green as color blind people cannot distinguish these colors. You can use Red and Blue instead.

Photos and Images

Electronic screen readers used by visually impaired people CANNOT read photos and images. So, when you are inserting an image into the page of your class PLEASE insert text into the ALT Text line depicted below. Screen readers READ the ALT text and inform student what they are looking at, or what the image is conveying, or instructions that are being given.

screen capture showing where alt text is inserted