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What's Accessibility?

Simply stated, accessibility generally refers to the ability for everyone, particularly those with special needs, to have equal access to materials on the web. This means that faculty need to think about using the principle of Universal Design, that is, creating course materials that accommodate the needs, learning styles and strategies of as many students as possible regardless of their ability.

Sections 504 & 508 of the Federal Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility and Compliance Act guarantee equal access to programs and services for everyone in institutions receiving Federal funding. California also has its own set of requirements for accessibility. What this means is that prior to course approval and implementation, all courses must be designed keeping those students who have special needs and require assistive technology in mind.

Accessibility Overview

Why Is Accessibility Important?

Accessibility is not only a federal requirement, but it is a way to create an equal and equitable experience for all students. When we design our materials to be accessible, we are making certain that we are reducing the barriers that can impact our students' success. The video below gives an overview of some of the issues our students may face when we have materials they are unable to access.

Accessibility, the Students' POV

The How of Accessibility

There are more extensive resources within this module on accessibilty and how to make your content accessible. This page will give you an overview about Universal Design for Learning (UDL). The content on this page has been made and formatted in multiple ways to illustrate how accessibility works. It's important to have various formats for students to interact with materials -- visual, text-based and audio. While this might not be possible for all of your materials it is something you will need to consider when vetting and creating online content.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

The content below gives an overview of how to design for everyone (UDL) and provides different ways in which one visual content element can have several alternatives that aid in accessibility. While we might be tempted to create only text-based content, we also need to remember that many of our Millenial and Gen Z students prefer video and visual content. UDL is a way to ensure that we are meeting as many needs of our students as possible.

Note: If you are accessing this content on a desk/laptop, you might have to quickly click all the tabs and then go back to the first tab in order to access the content on the first tab. (A Canvas quirk with tabbed content that sometimes happens in the browser version of Canvas .)

🎮Interactives/Dynamic Content
🎬Videos
🎨Images
📃Documents
💻Web Pages & Canvas

🎮Interactives/Dynamic Content

When incorporating publisher content and/or interactives into your course, it's important to make certain they are accessible. You should be able to find this information on the publisher website. This image slider content element is 'accessible', that is, someone using a screenreader will be able to read the alternative text and use a keyboard to navigate through the slider. Even so, alternative text only provides a short description and does not give a sight-impaired student all the information in the infographic. A text-based equivalent would make this content element much more accessible.

You can also access the UDL for Learning Image Slider directly as well.

Note: You might have to click on the arrows in the right hand corner of the content element below and then ESC to view on this page -- sometimes Canvas initially blocks embedded interactive content in tabbed pages in various browsers -- a Canvas quirk 🙄. It's always a good idea to also include a link to the content on a page (like above) so that students have an alternative way to view it if necessary.

🎬Videos

This is a video version of the content element. All video needs to be captioned for hearing impaired students, since narration often conveys more than the images on the screen. Ideally, video content should also describe what is happening on screen for students who are sight-impaired.

Note: Auto-captioning in YouTube is a great feature, but isn't considered accessible if the text and punctuation do not match the spoken text. Make certain that your video captions say English and not auto-captioned.

🎨Images

When designing for UDL, it's important to use both images and text. Images need to have what is called ALT text, that is a title/label that tells a screenreader what the image is. Most programs like Canvas will allow you to enter in an ALT text when you upload an image.

Infographics, such as this one, convey meaning and need to have some sort of text-equivalent so that students who are using screenreaders can still access the information from the content element. Other images, such as the icons on this page or the accessibility man on the first tab, are purely decorative, and can be marked as such. This allows students who are using screenreaders a chance to skip the content, reducing their cognitive load and making the web page more easily navigable/understood.

UDL & Multimedia Infographic

📃Documents

All documents that you upload to Canvas need to be created with accessibility in mind. MS Word has an accessibility checker that tells you whether or not your document is accessible and then gives you step-by-step instructions on how to fix documents. Google Docs does not have this feature, so it's always a good idea to either create your documents in Word and convert to Google Docs if you are new to creating accessible documents.

Regardless of the program you use, all documents need to be formatted using built-in Styles in Word -- Titles, Headings, Lists, etc.

In terms of document formats, MS Word is better than PDF for screen readers to navigate through.

Note: PDFs are basically images that have text 'tagged'. Infographics in PDF format would only appear to a screenreader as an image with alternative text. The text in a PDF infographic would not be accessible. Word documents converted to PDF have text 'tagged' and are only accessible if the Word document is accessible. Scanned pages converted to PDFs are images and are not accessible.

This page has 3 different versions of the text equivalent of the infographic. This would be the text equivalent that students who are using screenreaders would need to have in order to have access to all the information in the image.

Word: UDL & Multimedia Infographic Text Equivalent.docx
PDF: UDL & Multimedia Infographic Text Equivalent.pdf
Google Document: UDL & Multimedia Infographic Text Equivalent (Useful for Collaborations if editing privileges are allowed)

You can also embed Google documents in a Canvas page to create dynamic content that you can update more easily. There are several ways to do this, but the example below will give you an idea of what an accessible document embedded in Canvas looks like.

💻Web Pages & Canvas

One of the great things about the web is the amount of content available for online classes. However, many web pages are not actually accessible, and often present problems for our students. Some pages might have flashing elements, others might include Adobe Flash, while still others may have forms that students can't fill out if they are using only keyboard controls.

As a general rule of thumb, any web content that you require students to use should be accessible. Optional or recommended content doesn't have to be, but it's a best practice to try to make certain all of your external content is accessible.

A great tool to use is called the WebAIM WAVE Accessibility Checker. You can add this to your browser as an extension and easily check web content for accessibility.

Canvas

Even though Canvas itself is 508 compliant, the content you build and upload into Canvas must also be accessible. Like MS Word, Canvas has built-in styles to help you develop your pages. Canvas also has a built-in Accessibility Checker that, while really basic, can give you an overview of several types of accessibility issues such as text-contrast and table headings.

Note: The Canvas Accessibility Checker and Ally do not always catch issues with external material that you bring into Canvas. If you have an infographic image with a lot of information, for example, these programs will only catch whether or not the image has ALT text, but will not tell you that there should also be a text equivalent for the image.

Content on this page was created by Katie Datko for the Pasadena City College DE Faculty Handbook.

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