Specific Accessibility Solutions

Whether you’re working on making specific accommodations due to an accommodation letter from Student Disability Services (SDS), addressing basic accessibility issues using the Basic Four, or using Universal Design for Learning guidelines to make your course accessible to all students, creating accessible content is foundational to ensuring that students with sensory disabilities or who use assistive technologies can easily read and navigate your course. This page features links to web pages or downloaded Word documents where indicated.

Documents

The most common form of content is documents. Because documents are a visual medium, the goal is to assist students with visual disabilities and those who use screen readers.  Typically, the types of changes required for documents are those listed below.

  1. Semantic Structure (Headings)
  2. List Styles (Numbers and Bullets)
  3. Tables (Used for data)
  4. Contrast (Visible text)
  5. Descriptive Links

 

Images, Video, & Audio

Instructional video has become an indispensable part of online education and is increasingly important in traditional modalities as well. From lecture to lab demonstrations, nearly every course uses some type of video.  

However, for video to be accessible to people with hearing impairments, it needs to be closed captioned. On our video captions and audio transcripts page, we’ll show you how to create captions for your videos and transcripts for your audio recordings as well as introduce you to other accessibility options for video, such as audio descriptions.

Online Quizzes

Online testing is an essential part of online education and increasingly used in traditional courses because it makes grading easier and can be adjusted visually by the student. However, some of the options available for online testing (such as Respondus Lockdown Browser and the Respondus Proctoring tool) don’t work with some assistive technologies.

Other Accessibility Checkers

Explore various tools to enhance accessibility in your online, digital content. Learn to fix PDF accessibility errors with Equidox and Adobe Acrobat through DLI's resources. Use WebAim's WAVE tool to review website accessibility, and integrate Anthology Ally into your D2L courses for optimal accessibility.