Welcome to the Universal Design Toolkit Teaching & Learning Guide! 

This guide includes articles, step-by-step roadmaps, links, and resources designed to help you: 

• Apply Universal Design for Learning principles to your course materials;

• Create new course materials that meet accessibility guidelines;

• Revise existing course materials to become accessible to all students;

• Request support from your Instructional Designer, Disability Services for Students, and the Technology Service Desk.

As an instructor, you have the primary and ultimate responsibility to ensure access to your course materials by every student in every course you teach. The information in this guide will help you make intentional design and development decisions. 

For specific questions or support creating accessible course materials, contact your Instructional Designer. Once you have designed and incorporated access to course materials for all students, TWU Disability Services for Students (DSS) will work with you to provide any accommodation needed by individual students. 

Learners must be able to access all documents and presentations you share in your online course. All scanned documents need to be text-based, which means text in the scanned document can be copied using your cursor. This allows screen readers to read the text out loud to students. 

NOTE: When possible create your document first in Microsoft Word, taking advantage of all the accessibility features, then convert the file to PDF.

Use the links below to learn accessibility practices:

• Links or hyperlinks should incorporate descriptive text for screen readers.

• Images should contain alternative text that describes the image.

• Structure communicates the organization of the page content.

• Tables should be used to present data and contain a header and description.

• Color contrast should be strong enough to distinguish between text and the document background.

Videos and other media should be produced and delivered in ways that ensure that all learners can access the content. Instructors are ultimately responsible for providing accurately captioned videos in all their courses.  

Use the links below to learn accessibility practices:

• Audio and Video Resources - Depending on the type of audio or video resource, you will need to provide closed captions (a text version of the audio that is shown synchronized in the media player), transcripts (a separate text version of the audio), or audio descriptions of visual information (an additional audio stream that describes context essential for comprehension of the visual content).

•  Making Audio and Video Content Usable by All Learners - All audio and video content uploaded to your courses needs to be accessible. Even when closed captions are automatically generated, you will use four specific captioning standards to edit these auto-generated captions or request captioning services within Panopto.

Utility and tool programs for accessibility allow you to find accessibility issues, provide suggestions on how to correct the issues, or apply solutions to fix the issue. 

Use the links below to learn accessibility practices:

• Accessibility Checker - Many products used to create documents and presentations have built-in accessibility checkers, including Canvas and Microsoft Office. To learn more about running an accessibility checker in a specific product, visit our Accessibility Checker chart.

• PDF to Text Conversion - Portable Document Format (PDF) files created using a scanner or copier are saved as images. If this PDF contains text, you are required to convert the PDF to text or character so that the PDF is searchable and compatible with assistive technologies like screen readers. Use Adobe Acrobat DC to convert the image to text.

The following videos, created by Universal Design Champions, demonstrate how to apply Universal Design strategies. 

Instructors at Texas Woman's University can submit their course for an Internal Universal Design Review to assess ways the course can become more accessible for all learners. You can learn more and request a review.

Instructional Designers

Instructional Designers in Faculty Success design and present learning solutions to continually enhance institutional and instructor performance. We collaborate closely with instructors to translate course objectives into meaningful, customized courses tailored to each instructor’s specific needs, leveraging an aptitude for design and development, along with excellent problem-solving and analytical skills. 

Our technical expertise encompasses a range of programs and best practices, including Canvas, Quality Assurance, Universal Design, and more. Instructional Designers meet with academic components to answer questions about teaching and learning in one-on-one consultations, small group work, symposia, and workshops.

Disability Services for Students

Disability Services for Students (DSS) not only works directly with students to provide accommodations but also provides helpful information for instructors on access in the classroom, syllabus resources, and various accommodations.

Technical Support

To request technical support, submit a Technology Service Desk email to start a ticket.