Accessibility and Universal Design

Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) relates to all electronic content and applies to all faculty and staff at the college. We want to provide you with the information you need to help all of our students succeed!


Accessibility "Cheatsheets:" One-page accessibility resources that have been developed to assist anyone who is creating accessible content. They are hosted on the NCDAE (National Center on Disability and Access to Education) website.





PDFs - are they accessible? The most common violation when using PDF files is when they’re created by scanning, which only creates an image…it’s not real text, so not they're accessible at all. If you’re creating one from scratch, i.e. in Word, and it’s text only without heavy formatting, they're usually ok…it’s when you get into heavy formatting (columns, text boxes, etc.) and using pictures that it becomes problematic. Which, by the way, can also be an issue with Word and PowerPoint as well (see above). Here's a PDF accessibility checklist by the 


Universal design: It’s not just another fad; it ensures that your instruction can be understood and retained by everyone, not just those with disabilities. Thanks to Erin Meadows (now at JMU), the college received a Chancellor’s Innovation Fund grant during spring '16 to bring training and resources to BRCC.


The following workshops were offered during  in-service; you can view the recordings below. Read&Write software has been purchased and will be deployed to college computers this semester; it's available in F104 at this time. Faculty can also download the Read&Write Extension for Chrome for free; it has much of the functionality of the software. More training will available for Read&Write soon.



Spring '16 In-Service Sessions to Promote a Universal Design for Learning Classroom and Campus

Understanding Accessibility in the Classroom – Presented by Greg Krause from Interactive Accessibility, Section 508 ADA Consultant.