Accessibility

Online Faculty Development Course

A fundamental requirement for any Canisius College course, be it online, face-to-face, or something in between, in accessibility: students with the widest variety of abilities, including disabilities and neurodiversity, should be able to succeed.

Formally, students seeking academic accomodations for disabilities need to self-identify and register with the Student Accessibility Services Office (an arm of the Griff Center), complete the intake form, and provide current documentation from a licensed or certified official that clearly identifies the disability. Through consultation and evaluation, each student's needs are identified on a case-by-case, course-by-course basis. Accessibility Support will work with instructors to accommodate students with disabilities.

However, we encourage all faculty to think beyond the narrow definition of "disability" and instead create courses that are, by design, as accessible as possible.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

Activate close captioning on this video by clicking "CC" after it begins playing.

UDL is a philosophy where courses (and other resources) are designed to provide the widest variety of people access and opportunity. It is less focused on assumptions (visually impaired students use screen readers, or deaf students use captions) and more on providing several reliable ways to learn, complete activities, and participate.

For example, students who are not diagnosed with visual impairment can still benefit by consistent use of heading styles, since it makes the job of understanding course content easier. Students may not have hearing impairment, but might still benefit by captions on videos so they can watch them at times and in places where audio isn't practical or allowed.

Moreover, learning disabilities are not obvious in online or face-to-face courses, and students may elect not to self-identify potential impairments. If it is possible to accommodate potential disabilities before they are identified, we should do it. Here's some practices to ensure that your course content is accessible:

Headings

Use Heading Styles to format headings and subheadings, rather than "manually" formatting with tools such as Bold, Italics, Underlining, Color Change, and so on.

Screen Readers for the Visually Impaired can properly identify headings to those who cannot see the screen. This is not always the case with individual format changes made to text. Watch this short video, to see - and more importantly hear - a screen reader at work:

You can find heading styles in the toolbar of popular word processors, such as Word and Google Docs, as well as the content editor in D2L

Formatting Characters

Format basic, normal, or paragraph text to a suitably large size (11 pt or above.) Stick with high-contrast colors, such as black or dark blue on a white or gray background. Do not use colors alone to indicate emphasis, since visually impaired and colorblind students may not perceive this.

Lists

Use bulletted or numbered list tools built into Word Processors. Screen Reader technologies identify those properly to users. Here's an example:

Caption Videos

When you create videos for your students using Canisius' video creation and hosting tool, Panopto, it automatically generates text closed captions. Take a few moments to edit these, and eliminate those words or phrases that Panopto misunderstood.

Transcript

Editing Captions in Panopto

Go to the course that you have a video you want to edit the captions on
Click on the Panopto link in the course navbar
Hover over the video that you want to edit the Captions of
Click on the Edit icon
Click on Captions in the left-hand sidebar
Edit captions

Alt-Text for Images

Obviously, visually impaired students cannot see images. There's an alternative: Alt-Text can be stored with an image and read out loud by screen reader software. However, and in keeping with UDL philosophy, Alt-Text can also appear in place of an image if for some reason that image "breaks," or otherwise isn't were it should appear. So when you add images to digital documents and web pages, you need to include Alt-Text. Software typically makes this very easy to do; D2L practically insists you add Alt-Text! Here's two examples, D2L and Google Docs:

Transcript

D2L

Anywhere you can type or add an image on a D2L Tool (like descriptions of Course Activities, designing Quiz questions or Discussions, etc.) you can add alt-text to an image.
Find and click on the Image button in the toolbar.
Then click on My Computer.
Click on Upload.
Navigate to the appropriate image.
D2L will give you a pop-up automatically to insert alt-text or to say that it is decorative.
Click on OK.

For images already in the D2L Text area:

Click on the image.
In the toolbar that appears, click on the image icon.
Put your alt-text in the Alternative Description text box.
Click on Save.

Transcript

Google Docs

**This will work for Google Slides and some other Google Products too.

Insert your Image into your Doc
Right-click on it and choose Alt Text in the menu that appears
1. Alternatively, you can click on the image and use the Windows shortcut CTRL+ALT+Y or the Mac shortcut CMD+ALT+Y
Type your alt-text into the Description textbox. You may leave the Title blank, though it may be useful for quickly ID'ing the image later.

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