Digital Accessibility Training
- Fundamentals of Disability Accommodations and Inclusive Course Design: Learn about disability & reasonable accommodations, providing reasonable accommodations, and inclusive course design. All instructors, including graduate teaching assistants, are required to take this course. You may repeat this course as often as desired.
- Digital Accessibility: Foundations: Learn what digital accessibility means, why it matters, and how it can be incorporated into your work.
- Digital Accessibility: Create Accessible Canvas Course Sites: Learn how to apply accessibility concepts to content in an online course site.
- Digital Accessibility: Slide Presentations: Learn the specific skills needed to create accessible slide presentations for live presenting and for sharing afterwards, using either PowerPoint or Google Slides.
- Digital Accessibility: Documents: Create a document that is accessible using either Google Docs or Microsoft Word.
- Digital Accessibility: PDFs: Create a PDF that is accessible to the largest possible number of readers, using Adobe Acrobat DC.
Digital Accessibility Fundamentals
- Contrast: Make sure foreground and background colors and other visual indicators contrast each other.
- Text: Use font type & space, text alignment, white space, and line length to ensure the structure of your digital text matches its meaning.
- Headings: Structure digital content with paragraph styles in documents.
- Lists: Present key concepts, sequences, and like items of more than two as lists where possible.
- Tables: Simplify tables and include a header row and/or column and a summary, either in a caption or alt text.
- Links: Write links that are concise, descriptive, and meaningful out of context.
- Images: Include only meaningful images in your digital products, optimize them for online viewing, and provide contextual information.
- Alternative Text: Add alternative text, or "alt text," to every meaningful image in digital content.
- Videos and Audio: Include both human-edited captions and audio descriptions in videos and transcripts in audio-only content.
- Documents and PDFs: Make your digital documents scannable, searchable, legible, and readable.
- Slide Presentations: Use preset layouts, readable fonts, descriptive links, and alternative text in your slides.
Use the 3Rs Framework:
The 3Rs framework can help you break up and prioritize upcoming accessibility work and guide your next steps.
- Remove content you do not need now and delete content you no longer need..
- Revise digital content you need to share.
- Right First. Create new digital content with digital accessibility in mind from the beginning.
Test for Accessibility
Conduct accessibility checks early and often as you create and update digital content. Accessibility checkers highlight areas that might be problematic for people with disabilities, as well as anyone using assistive technology. Two UMN-supported accessibility checker tools are built in to Canvas.
These tools cannot find all accessibility issues, and they will not be able to tell you whether content makes sense or is outdated. Accessibility checkers and manual assessment must work in tandem; do not rely on accessibility checkers to tell you what is problematic, use them as a tool to assist you.
- Rich Content Editor (RCE): Includes an accessibility tool that detects common accessibility errors in content created within the RCE.
- Universal Design Online Content Inspection Tool (UDoIT): Scans content within a specific course site and creates a report that identifies possible accessibility issues.
As you create documents for your Canvas page, you should also check their accessibility. Accessibility checking features are built in to Microsoft Word. The Microsoft Accessibility Checker can be used to check both Word documents and Google Docs. For Google Docs, download the Doc as a Word file, use the Microsoft accessibility checker, then upload your file to Google Drive again.
Digital Accessibility Checklists
After you have made content accessible and texted for accessibility, review the below checklists.
Additional Resources
- Canvas: Create and Organize Content: This self-help guide takes you through the basic process of building a Canvas course site.
- Accessibility Event Recordings: Review recordings of past University accessibility events to dive deeper into specific digital accessibility topics.
- Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) Event Recordings: Members of UMN co-host GAAD events a presentations each year to get people thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion. Many presentations discuss how to build accessible course content and teach with accessibility in mind.
- Liberal Arts Technologies and Innovation Services (LATIS) Learning Experience (LX): Connects educators with tools to design accessible and functional digital learning environments that support student success.
- Instructor Digital Accessibility Toolkit: This toolkit offers resources to support instructors in making their content digitally accessibility, focusing on Canvas.
- Office for Digital Accessibility (ODA): The Systemwide entity designated to provide resources and services to the University of Minnesota community in support of the creation, development, and procurement of accessible electronic content and services.
- Understand Accessibility: Learn more about ways to understand accessibility and the benefits of designing for accessibility.
- Understand Disability: Despite progress in civil rights, disabled people continue to face outmoded ideas and access to barriers that limit their opportunities. Understanding disability, accessibility, and accommodations is important.