Accessibility
The Americans with Disability Act (ADA) of 1990, Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, states that all individuals should have equal accessibility -- including online instructional opportunities. ADA requires that all online courses be fully compliant from the start of the course.
More and more WI students need our courses to be ADA compliant. For example, the use of screen readers is becoming more common, so our courses need to facilitate their use. Course developers and instructors must do their due diligence to develop ADA-compliant courses. Look at this checklist to understand what those elements are.
Most elements for compliance are standard in WI courses and are incorporated when putting a course into Moodle. For example, WI will use its standard font, not the font a course developer wants to use. Please do not include colored, fancy fonts, as WI will eliminate them. Backgrounds and hyperlinks are also standardized to be ADA compliant. WI will not publish unclear images, audio, or video files.
This page is dedicated to those elements of ADA compliance that the course developer and instructor can control. Below are some simple strategies for creating accessible courses and demonstrating due diligence.
Avoid overuse of all caps, bold, or italics. We have noticed that some instructors tend to bold many words to emphasize their point, but this is bad practice. Others tend to frequently use all caps, especially in titles, or to use italics, thinking it makes a text look more spiritual. None of these are compliant with ADA standards, so please avoid them. Notice that ADA compliance means avoiding overuse of these techniques, so bold, all caps, and italics should be used very sparingly.
Avoid underlining words, as screen readers may mistake them for navigation links.
Add a written description for each image you include in the course.
Use audio and video files that are simple to play and do not require external players.
These elements also apply to Google Docs, PDF, and Power Point files that are linked to Moodle. Accessibility is not only for text published on Moodle, but for all published text for the whole course. For these external files, use only Arial or Helvetica (do not use Times New Roman or Palatino). Always use black font (default) on a light background. As explained above, avoid excessive use of all caps, bold, and italics. The only text that should be underlined is text that is hyperlinked.
Here are further guidelines to make text accessible.
Here is a helpful tutorial about making documents accessible.
Revised: 04/01/2022