Creating ADA Compliant Courses

Online content must be uploaded in compliance with the American Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines. It is of the utmost importance that developers ensure that students with disabilities have equal access to materials built into IU online courses as well as properly formatted for use with assistive devices.

The course must provide equal educational opportunities to all students, provide students with a sense of independence with the material and lend opportunity for these students to engage in the course related activities.

ADA Compliance Checklist

• Keep media that must be downloaded by students to a minimum

• Check your course from the students’ perspective

LINKS

• • Text descriptions are used for links

  • There are not instances of the same text pointing to different links (i.e., Multiple instances of “click here” pointing to different URLs)

TEXT

• • Dark font colors are used on light background colors

  • Avoids extremely bright colors as background colors

  • Uses one font throughout the site

  • Avoids overuse of all CAPS, bold or italics

  • Avoids underlining words, as the screen reader can mistake it for a navigation links

IMAGES

• • Avoids animated or blinking images (except in the case of an instructional simulation), blinking text or blinking cursors

  • All images have alt text/long descriptions attached to them

  • Audio player required is compatible with multiple operating systems and requires only a standard plug in

  • A written transcript is provided with all audio files

  • Audio quality is clear

VIDEO

• • Videos should be 3-10 minutes in length and allow students to pause or break while viewing.

  • Video quality is clear

  • Video player required is compatible with multiple operating systems and requires only a standard, free plugin

  • Provides closed-captioning or has accompanying text-based scripts for all videos

PDFs

• • PDFs are searchable and not images that were saved as pdfs