Accessibility for Online Learning

Module 2 Accessibility for Online Learning

Time to Read: about 5.5 minutes

Providing accessibility in online environments is the equivalent of designing a flexible cockpit for a pilot or curb cuts that help everyone get around independently. It's your responsibility to design well so that the greatest diversity of people can use the space you create. This is an amazing opportunity to make a direct and positive impact on many learners.

For your convenience, here are links to resources from the Center for Transformative Teaching.

It takes everyone to create a digitally accessible campus.

You might be wondering why the responsibility to make learning accessible should fall upon you. You are the expert in your field. You can connect the jargon and academic language of your field to your students. You can decode the complex diagrams, images, and symbols to something your students can understand. You know how the individual educational elements fit together and the purposes they work to achieve. You have designed the learning space, and now it's up to you to make sure that everyone in that learning space can be successful.

Designing accessibility into your course consumes less time than trying to retrofit accessibility features down the line. It's easier to add alternative text (alt text) to images as you embed them into your Canvas pages rather than combing through your course and checking each image for alt text and modifying it where needed. It's considerably faster to build screen reader friendly tables in Canvas at the start rather than reworking existing tables to be screen reader friendly.

The good news is that learning the digital accessibility features of your commonly used applications (including Canvas) is easy and depending on the feature, can be implemented quickly. Implementing accessibility in your course is not a monolithic endeavor. Every digital accessibility feature you implement helps improve learning and the learning environment for your students. Try not to let feelings of making everything accessible all at once discourage you from the changes you can make by the end of the week.

The Digital Accessibility Training in Bridge (link provided above) is a great resource for learning the digital accessibility features of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, video, PDFs, and Canvas.

We want to assure you, though, that you're not alone on this accessibility journey. Instructional designers watch for basic accessibility as they work with instructors, especially when an instructor has an interest in creating highly accessible course materials. They can be a partner in helping you learn about simple accessibility foundations.

Accessibility is something that should not be limited to the classroom. If we want our campus to be digitally accessible, we need to promote digital accessibility features for all digital items and from all stakeholders on campus. Digital accessibility features help everyone.

We've chosen to focus on asynchronous materials and synchronous materials separately because there are distinctly different actions to take in each space. Resources to learn about accessible online materials are plentiful, so we've collected some of the best resources for you here.

Synchronous sessions online

There are small ways you can promote a more universal, welcoming, accessible experience for learners during your synchronous sessions that can make a big impact. Here are a few things to do:

  • Turn on live machine captions if live captioning is relatively accurate for your course. Teams Links to an external site.and Zoom both have machine-based live captioning that you can utilize for free. Machine-based live captioning often isn't adequate for students with disabilities, though everyone can benefit from relatively accurate auto-captions if you're willing to turn them on.
  • Try to meaningfully describe visual content in your presentation as a means to help reduce reliance upon learners accessing the visual components of your synchronous sessions. This is a skill that you can develop over time with practice and the end result is that you'll communicate more clearly with your learners if it becomes a habit to explain more information to them.
  • Work with Services for Students with Disabilities when (or if) a learner needs accommodation services in real time. Again, free machine-based captioning may not be accurate enough for all of your learners, in which case the SSD office may have additional services available based on the learner's needs.

Accessibility checkers

A great way to begin your accessibility journey on asynchronous materials (like Word documents, Canvas pages, Excel Workbooks, and Adobe PDFs) is with built-in accessibility checkers. Accessibility checkers can make it easier to find some metaphorical curbs in your course and turn them into more accessible curb cuts. Unfortunately, accessibility checkers can check for some types of curbs but are inconsistent at spotting others. As such, it's important to help you learn what to watch for as you work on your content so that you can leverage accessibility checkers as a starting point and ensure even better access with your own checks of the content. Here's a list of checkers:

Canvas Accessibility Checker Links to an external site. 

Microsoft Accessibility Checker Links to an external site. 

Adobe Accessibility CheckerLinks to an external site.

We invite you to use accessibility checkers as a starting point. If you learn the foundations provided in the Digital Accessibility and UDL training in Bridge or described in the CTT's Accessibility & UDL Resource, you can implement these digital accessibility foundations in all your work. You'll make a course that is friendlier to all learners and, in the event a student needs highly accessible content, you'll have less to do!

Reflective Pause

Pause for a moment and consider digital accessibility in your online course. Write down your ideas.

  • What digital accessibility features are you familiar with?
  • What features or questions do you have about digital accessibility?