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How Do I Make Sure That Content Added Is Accessible?

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Amber Johnston
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Overview

With any of the courses designed in Skillways, accessibility is a critical area to keep in mind. Accessibility is part of universal design for learning (UDL). These guidelines support students with varied physical and cognitive differences and serve to minimize barriers to learning for in-person and online environments. Physical examples can be curb cuts or door access buttons to allow persons with disabilities access to places without barriers.

 

Five Main Categories

There are five main categories of disabilities: 

  • Visual
  • Hearing
  • Motor
  • Speech
  • Cognitive

Keep in mind that not all disabilities will be readily apparent. You might have neurodiverse students in your course who have learning differences, such as ADD, ADHD, autism spectrums, traumatic brain injuries (TBIs), chronic migraines, and other cognition factors. When you address as many perceived barriers as possible, you allow students of all abilities a chance to connect with their peers and with the content in multiple ways while minimizing barriers. Not all students with disabilities may self-report, but you can make accommodations upfront. Even if no students self-report at the beginning of the course, students may face temporary disabilities during the semester; they may have accidents, surgeries, and traumatic events that cause physical or mental limitations. Planning will serve you well so that you don’t have to spend unexpected time and resources to meet accommodation requests. Consider the following as ideas to meet requests: 

  • If they can’t type, they can use multimedia to submit an assignment using audio or video tools
  • If they can’t read textual content, they can view or listen to content in a video with audio or an audio recording (podcast)
  • If they can’t hear, they can read closed captioning on multimedia (also works for environments where they can’t use audio)
  • If they can’t see content, they can hear content using audio 
  • Be creative to meet different known and unforeseen learner challenges  

Additional considerations include formatting your course content, such as documents, presentations, and recorded lectures, and following these accessible design guidelines will prove useful. Save this page for future reference as a tool to make sure you hit the mark on effectively formatting content.

Formatting Documents and Presentation Slides

There are a number of ways to effectively format documents and presentations to ensure that they are accessible. These may include Microsoft Word or PowerPoint Presentations, Google Documents or Google Sheets. Keep the following tips in mind:

  • Font Choice: Always use a sans serif font. Some examples are Arial, Calibri, and Verdana
  • Font Size: Use a minimum font size of 12 (for PowerPoint presentations use a minimum font size of 24)
  • Color contrast: Color contrast is the difference between the text color of the foreground and the background color. This text is black text on a white background which is always accessible, but if you use yellow on a white background, students with a vision impairment will have trouble reading your material. A great tool for checking color contrast is the Paciello Group Colour Contrast Checker.
  • Bulleted Lists: Use the tool for adding bulleted lists in your documents (in the menu at the top of Word, PowerPoint, and Google tools). Don’t use the tab key or spaces to create a list.
  • Alternative Text: All images should have an alternative text description. This is a short description about the image that will be read to students who use a screen reader. This is the only way that a blind student will understand what the image is about.
  • Hyperlinks: Use a text description of the destination of any hyperlinks, not the URL. For example, it should look like this:
  • Audio content: Provide a transcript for all audio content
  • Video Content: Provide closed captioning and a transcript for all video content

Resources

UDL

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