The potential barriers of online learning must be taken into serious consideration when planning and delivering courses online to ensure students with disabilities are provided with equitable access. A great tool is the Accessibility Services Online Checklist developed by UPEI's Accessibility Services team.
One strategy for improving your course materials is offering students some choice of the format or resource to learn from. Ensuring that students with visual or hearing disabilities are not missing out on course lessons is a great starting point. Additionally, finding resources which approach or solve problems differently can help students with executive functioning. When designing your course you may want to deliberately arrange your materials so that students understand their choice and are able to easily navigate your online course.
Ensuring that any print resources that you have in your course are screen-reader accessible is a great way to cover a baseline accessibility for your documents. Many of the tools supported institutionally have tools to make your documents more accessible for screen-readers.
For documents that you did not create, you may want to check whether the text of the document can be copied so that a screen-reader can read it, or it can be copied to another program to be read there. If you are unable to highlight or copy the text of the document, you may want to check for a better version or contact your liaison librarian to see if the document can be processed with optical character recognition (OCR).
Accessibility Checker in MS Word
Accessibility Checker in MS PowerPoint
When sharing a video resource you've created you should ensure that the video is captioned and the captions are accurate to what is being said or described. Uploading video files to Youtube will allow you to take advantage of their auto-generated captioning. Youtube is a Google product, when logging in you will be able to use your UPEI email and password. You will be able to change the privacy settings of these videos. Changing the privacy settings to Unlisted allows you to share a link to students while making your content unsearchable on Youtube. If you have a script for the resource you will be able to add your own captions to the Youtube video.
If you are using Google Meet for a synchronous class there is an option for live captioning. These captions are not applied to the recorded file. If you are sharing the recording with students afterwards consider uploading this file to Youtube for adding captions.
When sharing resources that you have not created remember to check that these resources have captions.
One factor for ensuring accessibility in online classes is trying to balance and manage the amount of bandwidth required for the course. Students may have limited access to devices (e.g. a shared family computer) or Internet broadband (e.g. a low speed rural Internet connection).
Leveraging asynchronous course materials, such as readings, images, and online discussions is one approach. For video files, consider uploading them to Google Drive and sharing that video link, rather than uploading the video directly to Moodle.
You may also want to create a downloadable course-package of content that can be downloaded by students if they have poor internet connections at home.